LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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GREEK VIGNETTES. 



A SAIL IN THE GREEK SEAS, 
SUMMER OF 1877. 



JAMES ALBERT HARRISON. 



" The swallow brings us news 
'Tis time to sell the winter cloak, and buy the summer blouse." 

Artstoph. Birds, 714. Jebb. 
"The sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, 
wraps me in a most humorous sadness." Shakspere. 




BOSTON : 

HOUGHTON, OSGOOD AND COMPANY. 

§E&e Etoersttie H&vt&s, ©ambtt&je. 

1878. 



3 






/ 

Copyright, 1878, 
By JAMES A. HARRISON. 



RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE : 

STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY 

H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



To 
S. A. H. and L. N. B. 



NOTE. 

* 

This little book is a record of a few weeks' 
travel in Greece last summer. It does not make 
the least claim to thoroughness j no deep ques- 
tions of archaeology are discussed ; only the vivid 
impressions of the moment are given ; and the 
task of discussing the moral and political regen- 
eration of the modern Greeks is left to more 
elaborate investigators. The journey was a de- 
lightful succession of pictorial surprises ; the land- 
scape and the externalities of Greece could alone 
be noted, and there was no time for discussing 
Greek parliamentary reform, the subtler aspects 
of Greek character, or the inner and profounder 
life of this interesting people. The indulgence 
of the kindly reader is therefore asked for the 
many (doubtless) hasty judgments of these pages, 
the sudden transitions from subject to subject, 
the use of the present tense, and the constant 
recurrence of /. A book written in the fields, 
hotels, and ships, on one's knees, or sauntering 



VI NOTE. 

through olive groves with the thermometer ioo° 
Fahrenheit, must be guilty of all these ; so slight 
and perishable a thread of oriental travel hardly 
deserves the memorializing help of print at all. 
The author, however, with due apologies, brings 
it before the public with the hope that it may at- 
tract more attention to a field still, little explored 
by tourists. 

J. A. H. 
Lexington, Va. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. Through the Ionian i 

II. Summer Days in Athens .... 77 

III. Attic Experiences 146 

IV. Glimpses of Old and New Athens . 171 
V. Odds and Ends of Greek Life . . . 206 

VI. Through the Islands of the Blest . 245 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 



I. 



We left Milan at i.io p. m. for Venice, by the 
express, and rode through blinding dust till a deli- 
cious thunder-storm broke upon us, and we arrived 
in Venice amid grand lightning and deafening 
thunder. We got a charming glimpse of Verona, 
Padua, and Lago di Garda as we passed. Mount- 
ains on the Swiss and Austrian side and endless 
fields and vineyards on the other • crowds of peo- 
ple coming and going all the time. There was one 
poor German girl in distress : she seemed to have 
difficulty in understanding or being understood. 
We reached Venice at 7.45 a. m., covered with dust 
and fatigue, took a gondola, and were wafted (there 
is no other way to express the delightful motion) 
to the Hotel Victoria, where we flew into the arms 
(figuratively) of several waiters, all affectionately 
marshaled on the marble steps to receive us. 
Then we were taken up to the oddest sort of a 
room with double doors and windows that looked 
1 



2 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

nowhere, alcoves that concealed nothing, a floor 
tessellated in a sort of composition looking like 
Castile soap, and a pudgy bed hung with muslin 
to keep out mosquitoes. Despite this chamber 
of horrors, however, we had a delightful dinner 
and refreshing night's rest and then got up and 
rambled over our old haunts again, — the Piazza, 
San Marco, the Doge's Palace, the Piazzetta, etc. 
All seemed so fresh and familiar, so old and 
strange. A pale gray day : towards evening we 
witnessed a magnificent sunset from the cam- 
panile of San Marco's, — gold and pink. There 
was a band of music playing in the square, and 
an innumerable multitude of promenaders, while 
the full moon rose in dazzling mellowness and 
glorified the scene. To-day was indescribably 
beautiful ; full of golden sunshine as a rose is of 
bloom or a bright eye with tears. I took a gon- 
dola and was rowed up the Grand Canal, out into 
the lagoon, over to Murano, and back by Mala- 
mocco (where there is splendid surf-bathing) and 
the Armenian convent. What a lovely place this 
is ! With a garden full of blooming oleander and 
magnolia, a series of exquisite landscapes break- 
ing in on you through every window, and an inef- 
fable tranquillity. (Plague take these Aequo, I ae- 
quo freseof criers, who disturb one's meditations at 
every moment !) Except Tasso's Garden, I have 
never seen so lovely a spot. We saw letters there 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 3 

from Longfellow and Bryant and a host of celeb- 
rities, after which we went through the library and 
church and got a glimpse of the precious illumi- 
nated breviaries and MSS. We were shown 
Lord Byron's autograph and inkstand, then 
through picture-galleries, museum, printing room, 
and refectory. The garden was in infinite bloom, 
incomparable geraniums making great spots of 
Tizianesque color, tall cypresses casting ebon 
shadows, sweetness and peace diffused over the 
whole place, and such a gentle-faced, gentle-man- 
nered padre for a guide. It 's true his French 
was n't good, but I have seldom seen a sweeter 
face. Anda in pace. 

We got back to the Victoria thoroughly wearied, 
and are now about to start for Trieste ( 1 1.30 p. m.), 
where I hope to arrive to-morrow. Buona Notte ! 

We arrived at Ancona, on the Italian coast, at 
6, after a most beautiful sail down the Adriatic 
from Trieste, which we left yesterday afternoon 
at 4. We are in a Lloyd's coasting steamer 
going from Trieste to Smyrna, and touching at 
Ancona, Brindisi, Corfu, Cephalonia, Zante, Cer- 
igo, and Syra (all but the last Ionian Islands), 
a trip which I have long desired to make. The 
steamer is a charming little screw, the Oreste, 
with cool, well-ventilated cabin, and one of the 
tidiest state-rooms I ever had, curtained, with two 
port-holes whence brilliant views may be caught 



4 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

to seaward as through the end of a telescope ; 
heavy plate-glass mirror and luxurious lounge, 
withal high-ceilinged, and scrupulously clean. 
The view the whole afternoon after we had 
turned our backs on Trieste was indescribable. 
The wind blew gently and freshly right behind 
us, just curling the waves till they laughed and 
lapsed over into sparkling white caps, while the 
grand Austrian Alps hung over the northwestern 
shore as if to take a last look at us. They were 
snow-capped in places. Imagine their exquisite 
beauty veiled by this wonderful azure air and 
glimmering blue-white through the film of trans- 
parent atmosphere between. The head of the 
Adriatic with Trieste as a brooch is a vast am- 
phitheatre of semi-encircling mountains, a scene 
and centre of unrivaled fertility. From Navre- 
sina, where we changed coming from Venice to 
Trieste it is more than a garden. The mount- 
ains of Udine are great belts of luxurious vege- 
tation. The vine creeps all over their sides ; the 
fig grows wild, apparently ; an infinite garden fol- 
lows the railway ; delicious glimpses of the Adri- 
atic peep in through the great rents in the blasted 
rock ; the road is high up on the mountain side, 
and deep below the sea is rimmed and embroi- 
dered with bright flower-inclosed villas, where the 
Austrian and Italian nobility go into villeggia- 
tura in the summer. What an eye for the pict- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 5 

uresque these strange, matter-of-fact railway peo- 
ple seem to have ! Or is engineering an imagin- 
ative science ? They select their sites as care- 
fully as a poet would the subject for an epic 
poem. This run from Cormous to Trieste is 
truly epic. We could see Miramar far beneath 
on a promontory, — Miramar of tender and pa- 
thetic memory. It is a white, gleaming villa- 
castle, laved by the Adriatic and imbedded in 
trees and flowers. I did not have time to go up 
and visit it. We passed a restless night coming 
from Venice, starting up in tremulous excite- 
ment every half hour from brief snatches of sleep, 
to see whether we had reached the place for 
changing trains, and then having intervals of 
intense sleep in between, for we were fagged and 
satiated with the desert-like scenery of Venice. 
Every now and then during the night I would 
break out into floods of inspired Italian, inspired 
or injected into me through horror of getting out 
at the wrong place. It ? s amazing what feats of 
memory one will perform in need. I quite as- 
tonished my batteliere in Venice, after his long 
spasms of excruciating French, by unexpectedly 
breaking out into fluent Italian. " Signore com- 
prende Italiano bene," cried he, quite offended, 
as if I had been taking an unbecoming advantage 
of him. His indignation was flattering. Where 
the Italian came from I do not know ; but I found 



6 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

myself chattering away as we gondolaed about 
among the lovely isles and lagoons, now shooting 
out into broad sheets of trembling green sunlight, 
now floating into the shadow of ancient walls and 
gardens on some remote zso/a, where the per- 
fumes of oleanders were wafted to us over the 
convent walls, or a deep-toned bell came vibrat- 
ing with strange sweetness over the water. What 
a luminous, languid day it was, with its evening 
wing sprinkled with iridescent light, like a pea- 
cock's ; far-off mountains of Padova and Udine 
standing in breathless calms and windless sea, 
momentarily expecting to be doubled by a mi- 
rage; the mighty roll of the surf on the long shore 
of Malamocco ; the cries of the mad people as we 
passed the immense Spitale dei Pazzi, and Venice 
lying along the distance with innumerable towers 
and palaces, all enchanted into sudden brilliance. 
But, best of all, dear old San Lazaro took my 
fancy, — a convent where the twenty religieux 
who now dwell there must pass a heaven of 
peace and sunnyness and gentle calm. The 
crimson of its oleanders and the whiteness of its 
blossoming magnolias, the blaze of its geraniums 
and the slender shafts of its cypresses, the vine- 
trellised pillars and long succession of cool clois- 
ters, are now before me. I could not keep my 
eyes off the marvelous views from the windows. 
Picture-galleries, curiosities, scientific cabinet, 



GREEK VIGNETTES. J 

the noble library of thirty thousand volumes in 
vellum, all were as nothing to this splendor and 
shock and surprise of ever succeeding beauty. 
" What a beautiful view you have here/' said 
I to the guide in French, when we came into 
the ornithological department, where numbers of 
bright-plumed birds and butterflies looked out 
from their glass cases on us, and the ceiling was 
one sheet of sunny painting. " Bellisima ! " said 
the gentle padre, forgetting his French and gaz- 
ing wistfully out on the magnificent landscape 
stretched in blue and gold before us. There 
were Armenian inscriptions everywhere ; one over 
the refectory door that he interpreted for me : 
" Silence." He showed me pictures of their 
gorgeous canonical robes, a volume of Arme- 
nian liturgies printed in thirty different lan- 
guages, photographs of George Lord Byron (one 
of which we purchased), pictures of the convent 
garden (a blessed spot of sunshine and blossom- 
ing sweetness), memories of the convent in many 
a widely-separated speech, Turkish proverbs 
translated into English, ancient illuminated MSS., 
etc. I was loath to leave. What a strange con- 
trast between this poetic quietude and fullness 
of refinement and the wild cries of the madmen 
as we passed their asylum quite near ! Such con- 
trasts are found everywhere in life. 

I did not at first understand my gondoliere. 



8 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

and thought the He des Fous was a hospital and 
they were having a sort of Hospital Sunday, 
there seemed such a wild gayety in their cries. 
The whole immense establishment seemed vocal 
with noises, singing, shouting, quick talk, and in- 
distinguishable murmurs. There is a sparkle in 
these poor Italian people that not even madness 
can quench. What uncanny vivacity they have, 
how their eyes flash at nothing, — those crystal- 
line lenses of fire and dew ; how they gesticulate 
and intone in their melodious language ! We 
found the cries of the boatmen of Venice very 
interesting. They have a peculiar warning cry 
when they are turning a corner, and even carry 
on animated dialogues as they pass one another, 
having a laugh or a jest for everybody, — the 
straw-hatted, blue-ribboned, bright-sashed ras- 
cals ! I am told they are a most honorable class. 
A class of superannuated gondolieri eke out a 
miserable life by hauling in the gondolas that 
land at different places and making them secure. 
I thought they were impertinent lazzaroni and 
generally turned away impatiently till I heard 
their sad story. Many of them wear a caftan. 
In Venice the flower-girls will put a bouquet into 
your button-hole, so you had just as well submit; 
and the caramelle sellers with their basket of dain- 
ties, their cherries, or little sharp sticks dipped in 
syrup, etc., are a constant annoyance. And the 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 9 

women in men's hats carrying huge copper buck- 
ets of water from the fountains in the Doge's 
Palace ! And these fountains, themselves of the 
sixteenth century, with beautifully moulded bas- 
reliefs in copper, too ! And the pigeons in 
legions that haunt the square and light all over 
you if you throw them anything. What a fan- 
tastic place is Venice ! 

Well, the whole evening after we left Trieste 
was one of singular loveliness. The steamer was 
not fast and we had time to take in the varied 
sea and landscapes that passed panoramically 
before us. On one side, the dim Euganean Hills 
overhung by the dazzling apparition of the Aus- 
trian Alps, for they were as faint as an appari- 
tion ; on the other, the picturesquely indented 
shore of Istria, dotted with villages and cam- 
paniles, curving harbors and long lines of white 
hamlets stretching along it. The Adriatic was 
alive with fishers and their boats ; some with 
bright yellow sails, others with brilliant red, 
others with red and yellow stripes, and still others 
painted, some with crosses and globes, others with 
regular pictures. Many of them were leg-of-mut- 
ton rigged schooners. They looked like bright 
birds skimming over the clear green water, part- 
ing it into a long white moustache of brilliant 
foam, and speeding it like Homer's mea 7rrcp- 
oci/ra. Trieste harbor was full of them as well 



IO GREEK VIGNETTES. 

as of picturesque costumes, — Greek, Turk, Dal- 
matian, and Albanian peasants, Portuguese, ne- 
groes, and dark-visaged, wide-trousered mariners 
from all parts. The harbor abounded in ship- 
ping, too. Trieste is the seat of one branch of 
the immense Lloyd corporation, and their office 
there is a palace in its proportions. We passed 
one light-house and castle after another ; one 
arrowy campanile and church-spire after another ; 
and the sun set in a sea of gold and lighted up 
the mighty amphitheatre like the vast candela- 
brum of some giant opera-house. I remarked 
the velvety sheen and softness of the sky, an 
appearance which I had never noticed before. 
It was like the thickest, softest quilted silk. 
With us and in our metallically white light there 
is no such radiance of softness ; no such color as 
of cream-tinted porcelain. 

Wearied with so much beauty, we went down 
to our state-room and took a nap, — not, however, 
before we had dined. An odd dinner it was, too ! 
It consisted of five or six courses, all more or" 
less meagre and curious. The first was a mimic 
mountain of rice permeated with some sort of 
gravy and moulded artistically on a great platter ; 
then a course of sardines and olive oil and slices 
of thin, round sausage ; then roast or fried veal 
and potatoes ; then cheese and bread ; then wild 
strawberries with lemon-juice ; then some deli- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. II 

cious cherries. When I came up on deck again, 
about 9 o'clock, the full moon was flooding the 
eastern sea with gold, — a long river of rippling 
illumination more pearly-soft than anything we 
know in our sharp climate. After enjoying the 
glorious warm breeze I went below, and, despite 
nocturnal visitors, slept well. 

The ship, which is a small one, rolled somewhat 
in the night. The captain fortunately speaks 
English, which nobody else on board seems to do, 
but some of the engineers, I am told, speak Ger- 
man. We arrived here (Ancona) early this morn- 
ing. Immediately the ship was surrounded by 
clamorous boatmen, dancing about with astonish- 
ing volubility, out-doing one another in bids for 
passengers, of which there were very few. It is 
truly a " magneefecent " coast, as the captain 
says with his strong Italian accent. There are 
two moles which hem in the harbor on each side 
and create a fine and spacious basin for ships. 
We are at anchor, and remain here till 10 to- 
night. I shall go ashore presently and make a 
few explorations. The cathedral is, they say, 
worth seeing. I hear many bells ringing, as one 
always does in Italian towns. We even heard the 
scream of the railway whistle just now. The 
coast is precipitous and the houses are built 
one above another. The cathedral stands in the 
most striking place of all, and there are vari- 



12 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

ous picturesque fortifications crowning different 
heights. 

The water at Ancona is of the most beauti- 
ful color, — light green in the harbor and dark 
green in the Adriatic. The line where they join 
is distinctly seen. Near us is a queer lugger with 
leg-of-mutton rig, full of fishermen. Her sails 
are greenish yellow and black. At a distance 
there are two others with gaudily painted sails 
flung gayly in the wind. The passenger boats 
have awnings. What a fresh, vivid breeze comes 
in from the sea ! No color-box could rival these 
hues of Italian sea and land. There were some 
queer-looking steerage passengers on board with 
green and white sashes, sandals, full breeches, 
and oriental caps. They slept on a piece of tar- 
paulin under the open sky all night, I believe. 
This morning at 6.30 we had cafe noir or cafe au- 
lait, as we liked, with bread and crackers. At 1 1 
there is a dejeuner a la fourchette. Our awning 
makes grateful shade, for the sun is exceedingly 
bright. Everywhere over the water I hear the 
quick gallop of the Italian tongue. There seems 
to be no particular sentence-accent to it, no in- 
flections like the French or English. It is quick, 
sharp, rolling, and monotonous gobble, gobble, 
gobble. On our ship we are given four meals a 
day, — mattina, tea or coffee with bread ; colazione 
(luncheon), eggs, two hot dishes, salami, cheese, 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 3 

fruit, and bread, cafe noir ; firanzo (dinner at 5), 
soup, four hot dishes, pie or pudding, fruit and 
cheese ; sera (supper), tea or coffee, with milk or 
spirits, bread and butter. Wine is extra. There 
is change of plates, even if you take a sardine. 
Olives, pickles, and condiments are used in abun- 
dance as a sort of alimentary oakum to fill up the 
chinks. Lemon-juice on the strawberries is deli- 
cious and gives a peculiar and pleasant piquancy. 
The Italians, like the Germans, eat with their 
knives and fingers. Yesterday, in the Hotel de 
la Ville at Trieste, we were given grated cheese 
to sprinkle in our soup, and there was (as a rarity) 
wine at the table d'hote. An ugly, scrofulous- 
faced Italian, too, ogled and grimaced, as he im- 
provised and drank healths in champagne to a 
lady. He had a singularly malign and sinister 
face, hardly any nose, and a great, wide, flat face 
and gleaming teeth. He wore a pair of huge eye- 
glasses and grinned perpetually. The whole menu 
reeked of grease. 

Trieste is a gay place, so full of sailors and 
moving population. I noticed countless white 
steers yoked singly or in twos to wagons. This 
seems to be a favorite draft animal with the 
Triestais, The scene in the fish-market was very 
lively — fruits, flowers, fish, and vegetables, all in 
heterogeneous confusion, everybody shouting and 
trafficking, the cockers winking at you to take 



14 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

their vehicles, the flower-sellers thrusting pinks 
and violets into your hands, the lazzaroni yawning 
and begging, the air white with limestone dust, 
through which the sun beamed, like snow, straw- 
berries and cherries and oranges in tons, equally 
attractive to flies, urchins, and market-people. 
The town-hall and theatre are fine buildings. I 
no sooner entered the hotel than I was pounced 
upon by a lantern-jawed commissionnaire who with 
ready ofnciousness insisted on doing everything 
for me in a trice, — get my ticket, take my name, 
guide me about, drive me to Miramar, change 
my money, flood me with miscellaneous informa- 
tion ; in short, lick my boots and pick my pock- 
ets, if necessary. A cringing, saucy creature, a 
sort of ambidexter in humility and insolence. I 
have an instinctive aversion to such fellows, and 
they seem to have an instinctive affinity for me. 
As soon as he found I could speak a little Ger- 
man and get along very well for myself, that was 
quite sufficient ; I was dropped like a hot cake, 
and had no more trouble with the fellow. These 
men are often unprincipled scoundrels. Every- 
where money is stolen from one when changed 
by hotel-clerks, stewards, etc. An Englishwoman 
whom we met in Venice, and who knew them 
well, said she never saw such people for lying 
and bribery as the Italians. "If you could only 
believe one word they say ! " said she. I had it 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 5 

exemplified in Trieste, where a lying omnibus- 
driver came near convincing me that the vessel 
sailed at 10 and not at 4, when I was rescued 
from his claws by some of the by-standers. He 
took the rebuff with the utmost coolness, and 
said, " Well, the gentleman could deposit his bag- 
gage at the steamer ! " 

And the insolent head-waiters, camerieri, som- 
meZiers, and oberkellner one meets in England, 
France, and Germany ! Creatures in white neck- 
tie (which ought to be the gallows-string of half 
of them) and swallow-tail, side-whiskers and hair 
parted in the middle, " foolish, fat scullions " as 
full of puff and self-importance as one of ^Eolus' 
bags was with wind. I cherish the profoundest 
horror of these important personages. They 
meet you at the hotel door and greet you lovingly 
when you are departing in the hope of a franc or 
a lira or whatever it is. I never give them any- 
thing if I can possibly avoid it. But the faithful 
hausknecht or boots, often with a wife and nu- 
merous offspring, ought always to be remembered. 
The steward on the steamship Spain (our Atlan- 
tic steamer) who performed this office was the 
most ghastly-looking object from loss of sleep 
and ill-health I ever saw. He said he made up 
for it by sleeping on land ! On our present ship 
there is a framed notice in five languages, — Eng- 
lish, German, French, Italian, and Greek, — giving 



1 6 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

various notices to the passengers, with a table of 
wine-tarifTs and a table of values for gold coins. 
The vivacious Greeks will, I suppose, cheat us 
out of half our remaining possessions through our 
ignorance of their complicated currency, drachma, 
lefita, oboli, colonnati, tallari, and what not. Span- 
ish dollars of six drachmae are their favorite coin. 
Gold coins are scarce in Greece. I believe they 
even still reckon in Turkish piastres. The So- 
cratic obohis, used still in Greece, is an imaginary 
coin like the paolo in Italy, and the shilling with 
us. Every contract with inn-keepers, muleteers, 
and boatmen must be made in writing or every- 
thing will turn out to one's disadvantage. If I 
escape from them as well as Lord Byron did from 
Dr. RomanelFs prescriptions I shall be happy. 

The mosquitoes will be annoying, as they were 
in Venice. What does Baedeker mean by a " sort 
of gnats with gauze wings ? " * And Murray 
speaks of "gnats," which are entirely different 
things. One already thirsts for the delicious land 
scenery of Greece, over which even Murray grows 
poetic. The habit of making guide-books and 
binding them in red leather is fatal to the imagi- 
nation. What imagination can there be in these 
mechanical manufactures, guide-books, which 

1 Helas ! I bitterly found out what Baedeker meant after 
a few days in Athens. The Greek Kcbvuip and oniip are not 
agreeable acquaintances. 



GREEK VIGNETTES. I J 

some enterprising firm engages a Peregrine Pickle 
to write up for it at short notice, and which dis- 
course of everything — scenery, customs, geog- 
raphy, geology, currency, hotels, and vermin — in 
the same breath ; alternate pictures of the Par- 
thenon, and Maynard's Patent Protector against 
Bugs ; the street of Tombs with Sir George 
Somebody's chinchifuge ? It sets one's head in a 
whirl. Quotations from the Odyssey and Iliad 
will not consort with lazzaroni, thieves, and free 
pratique. How much better are Augustus Hare's 
charming "Walks!" But as soon as a guide-book 
sets about a determined and resolute description 
of a point, nearly all the interest vanishes and 
the reader becomes the prey of desperate ennui. 
Far more pleasant is a " Rambles in Greece " 
like Mahaify's, or a " Grece Contemporaine " by 
About, — books which really interest ; the one a 
work of genius, the other a work of scholarship. 
A set guide-book is an infinite weariness. Inter- 
ested as one is in all that relates to modern and 
ancient Greece, it is all but impossible to get up 
an interest in Murray's compilation. The whole 
subject petrifies as if it had been dipped in an 
Irish bog. Set adjectives are doled out here and 
there ; iron routes are laid down and planted be- 
fore you like railways ; gulfs, rivers, seas, and 
lakes freeze as you read about them ; classical 
topography becomes a monstrous bore, and Thu- 
17 



I 8 GREEK VIGNETTES, 

cydides and Sophocles automatons milling out 
quotations that all invariably appear singularly 
infelicitous. Where is the purple sheen of the 
Greek seas, the sculptured, sunny coast, the infi- 
nite breeziness and beauty of the island pictures 
and panoramas, the ilex and arbutus-clad heights 
and promontories, the sites of the temples on 
starry altitudes, the dreaming and desolate cities 
which Cicero so pathetically mourned ; in short, 
the whole movement and dance and gayety and 
pathos of Greek scenery ? It becomes naught 
under such processes of disenchantment. Guide- 
books are purely commercial enterprises. They 
lack the essential characteristic, — purposeless- 
ness. So soon as you set to work to tell people 
all about a thing you in reality tell them nothing. 
It is looking for the fairy-ring in broad daylight. 
The fairy-land of Greece loves an uncertain moon- 
light of inquiry, — a careless, lover-like traveler 
who takes in the weird richness of the air and 
water and land without building roads through 
them or erecting works of engineering on Calypso's 
isle. Hence the marvelous charm of Hawthorne's 
incidental descriptions, and passages in Gautier's 
oriental travels. Lamartine and Chateaubriand, 
Goethe and Emerson have the same gift. Travel- 
ing with such guides over Greece would be divine. 
It is a wonder that publishers don't engage men 
of real genius to do their work. Such compila- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 9 

tions as even the best American-European guides 
are intolerable. The English is poor, the descrip- 
tions mechanical, the information meagre, and the 
tone false. I left A. at home in disgust, — a 
work which professed to run over the whole of 
Europe in one volume, octavo. A pretty mess it 
makes of it, too ! As well print and bind the waves 
of the Atlantic. And then, in the loquacious com- 
mission naire-like desire to tell you everything, 
they tell you nothing and leave your hands full of 
ashes like Dead Sea apples. I carried such a 
pack of printed scoriae with me to Europe one sum- 
mer, — one of those universal guides and gazet- 
teers, — and resolved never to do so again. Here, 
in the very face of Greece, one feels Greece oozing 
away from one through Murray's fingers. I fear 
I shall be completely desillusio?ine by the time I 
get there. How can you enjoy a mountain when 
you are told exactly how many feet high it is, its 
latitude and longitude, productions, barometric, 
thermometric, and diabolic and geologic changes, 
distances from such and such unpronounceable 
points, botany, and general constitution ? Does 
not the whole thing become like the labeled 
horrors of a zoological museum ? Of course it 
is undeniable that there is much indispensable 
information given, — customs, passports, money, 
servants, hotels, shops and shopping, quarantine 
steamers, consuls, and routes; but a book like 



20 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

Bradshaw does all this and more, for it does not 
pretend to go into elaborate pen-and-ink delinea- 
tions. You expect more from a red leather oc- 
tavo that cost fifteen shillings. 

The sail from Ancona to Brindisi was delight- 
ful, — cloudless skies and perfect nights. Occa- 
sionally we would meet a felucca, curiously rigged 
and full of wild-looking mariners, such as the 
author of " Eothen " describes, — a great broad- 
bottomed Homeric cr^e^i??, with three or four fan- 
tastic triangular sails arranged at different an- 
gles to one another, — purely, as it would seem, 
for pictorial effect, for they are the most unpracti- 
cal of sails conceivable, and let all the wind go by. 
How fanciful and picture-like they looked, on the 
breezy Adriatic, almost out of sight of land ! I 
nearly always noticed two together, — -Jesuits of 
the sea. Heaven only knows what the dialect of 
these fishermen is. At Corfu they put Greek ter- 
minations to their Italian. The speech of this en- 
tire region is an indescribable mosaic, — Turkish, 
Albanian, Italian, Greek, and Spanish patois, the 
pigeon-English of the Mediterranean. The coast 
of Italy was dimly descried all day yesterday. I 
could see the snow-surtouted Apennines, peering, 
vision-like, through sun-lit mist. The opposite 
Greek coast was, of course, too distant for obser- 
vation. Our little steamer sails along blandly 
and hardily, without saying aught to anybody. 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 21 

There is no observation-taking, nor dividing the 
day into bells, nor comparison of local with chro- 
nometer time, as on the Atlantic, not even a 
plummet let down, or a knot-measure. They go 
straight ahead, apparently by the dead reckoning. 
Our captain's favorite exclamation is, "Ah, diav- 
olo ! Ah, diavoli ! " He is a sharp-eyed, pigeon- 
toed Italian, with a peremptory air and a light 
step. There is now no passenger beside myself. 
We got to Brindisi very early this morning. A 
small, sinuous, river-like harbor, with little ship- 
ping and not much capacity. Vergil died here, 
and (curious association of ideas !) the famous 
Appian Way had its end at the same Brindisi. 
How pleasant it would be to read the " Voyage 
to Brundusium " here. It is a pretty place, a 
gleaming sea and atmosphere, ships coaling, 
row-boats innumerable skimming the rippling 
water, half naked lazzaroni lounging on the quay, 
pink and yellow and white houses lining the 
shore, feluccas flinging their light sails to the 
wind, an antique column rising and overlooking 
the harbor, the strange-windowed Hotel des In- 
des Orientales with its rose-colored fagade, the 
bright green water curled into an infinite emerald 
irregularity, and the softest of breezes, — alto- 
gether a gay little picture. To-day we had deli- 
cious figs and apricots for lunch. Also grilled 
tomatoes with veal, stuffed veal with green peas 



22 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

and gravy, an omelette and cafe nero, which is 
good fare for an Italian ship. The state-rooms, 
small as our vessel is, are the most comfortable I 
have ever inhabited, and I am no inconsiderable 
traveler. There are two stewards or camerieri, 
— a tall, loud-voiced one, and a small, frowsy- 
haired one. The tea and coffee we get on board 
are the only drinkable tea and coffee I have en- 
countered on the sea. The Italians certainly ex- 
cel in coffee and in ice-cream. 

A scene of exquisite beauty is before me. The 
Ionian Sea, like the most dazzling blue silk, lies 
in front. On the coast is the lofty and barren 
Albanian mountain-range, treeless and desolate, 
cleaving the lucid atmosphere like a sharp scim- 
itar, and seamed and indented with mountain 
torrents and caves. They are full of silvery blue 
shadows. In this cloth-of-gold air what a dis- 
tance one can see ! We have just passed a white 
limestone island, apparently uninhabited ; others 
are scattered, like silver on opal, over the blue 
Ionian. We are approaching Corfu, the Corcyra 
of the ancients, identified by Thucydides with the 
Phaeacia of the Odyssey. If so, we are in the 
fairy-land of Homer. I have seen, as yet, but 
one light-house on all these islands ; an occa- 
sional felucca dipping up on the horizon, or a 
ship-like crag at a great distance. The air 
seems full of Penelope's web, — a delicate irritat- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 23 

ing gauze, that makes a wonder-land of all these 
rugged rocks, but worries and thwarts you. Was 
there ever a storm in these placid seas ? Can 
we here enter into the experiences of Odysseus 
on his tempestuous wanderings ? x This blue and 
silvery beauty is indeed that " azure morn " of 
which Theocritus speaks, ■ — a morn that colors 
the seas, paints the atmosphere, makes the mount- 
ains opalescent, and touches the horizon with 
milky whiteness. This looks like a vast lake. 
The most beautiful white clouds hang pictur- 
esquely over the peaks of the Albanian range, scat- 
tering opaque but prismatic shadows all over its 
sides and letting in a flood of sunbeams to illu- 
mine sharply other portions. The scenery just 
here reminds one of Lake Champlain. 

We took on several new passengers at Brindisi, 
— a blonde and a brun Italian, strange-costumed 
steerage passengers, etc. At breakfast we were 
all quite funereal ; spending the time alternately 
eating and casting furtive glances at one another. 
Not a word was said. A melee of rice and gravy, 
seasoned with tomatoes and garnished with chick- 
en-livers, was one of our dishes. They poach eggs 
capitally, and the fruit continues good. How one 
could sail a life-time away on such water, — wind- 
less, stormless, rimmed in by fairy mountains, lit- 

1 Kinglake considered Odysseus' voyage of ten years 
from Troy to Ithaca quite moderate ! 



24 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

erally spangled with bright islands, cloudless, sap- 
phire-iridescent, a silvery infinitude, land-locked, 
— not even a gull to be seen, nor a white-sailed 
felucca. It is the land of the Lotus-eaters — of 
the afternoon. This must be Corfu in front of 
us, — ■ a long, irregular, mountainous island, look- 
ing as if it had basked in the pitiless sunlight 
since the Pisistratidse, with a white gleam along 
the shore as of surf, or sunlight, or sand, dotted 
over with spare trees, all standing so wonderfully 
revealed, like a piece of sculpture. Cypresses 
puncture the air in groups, and soft slopes and 
swells are beginning to heave in sight. The Al- 
banian shore continues grand and blue-gray. We 
run within a short distance of it. One end of 
Corfu is only a mile or so off from the Albanian 
main-land, — that province which has given the 
national dress to the Greeks, the descendants of 
the ancient Illyrians, whose language Whitney 
puts down with Etruscan and Basque, as possi- 
bly Indo-European. I see houses here and there, 
and what seem like farms on the Corfu side. 
Not a human dwelling on the opposite coast. A 
light-house on a cream-colored rock, rising out of 
the blue sea, is just on the left. There is a mar- 
velous calm over everything. What little wind 
there is is behind us. A ship in full sail is just 
along-side. The wonderful panorama of the 
Strait of Corfu opens before us : long vanishing 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 2$ 

lines of ethereal-looking mountains, a sky dyed 
with the intense pale blue of great heat, "dark 
purple spheres of sea" and "summer isles of 
Eden," passionate color on earth and sky, 
bald crags and precipices, ever-looming dis- 
tances hung with islands as with purple fruits : 
behind us the dazzling curve of sea down which 
we have come, with a marble-like islet in the fore- 
ground touched here and there with arbutus and 
olive, and the grand azure arm of the Albanian 
Mountains, reaching scythe-like around the outer 
edge of our course — all is one wavy world of 
luminous water, carved into scintillant gulfs and 
indentations against the bosom of the opposing 
coasts. It looks more as if we were sailing in 
the sky than on the sea. They speak of fearful 
hurricanes and thunder-storms in these seas. 
As well speak of hurricanes and thunder-storms 
in Paradise. The moon was as sunny as an ap- 
ricot last night. To-day the sun has powdered 
the air with gold dust. There is * heat, but it is 
tempered by the salt sea. I do not see how we 
shall escape from this thick woven net of coast, 
— coast in front, behind, on each side. But on 
we go, with the wind changed and blowing right 
in our faces. 

There is a great stalwart Greek promenading 
up and dow r n the lower deck dressed in white 
petticoats, long white stockings, loose green 



26 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

jacket, and red caftan, with gaiters. Another in 
a vivid red caftan with long, pendant blue tassel, 
close-fitting jacket, wide blue cottonnade trousers 
gathered at the knee, and white stockings. 

Looking back behind our ship is even more 
wonderful than looking forward. It is like the 
finest scenery of Lake Como or Lago Maggiore, 
— the sea one sheet of waveless blue, the atmos- 
phere so limpid that you seem to see behind the 
mountains whose crests stand out in it in a thou- 
sand bright and illustrated forms, ships becalmed 
in this Circe-like lake, a flight of tremulous zeph- 
yrs hovering about your face and hair all the 
time, the whole one picture of radiance and vo- 
luptuousness. I am obliged to abandon my 
blood-and-thunder Italian romance every moment 
to gaze on this enchanting landscape. It is the 
crystal sky of Hellas, the " surpassing ether " of 
Euripides, the land of the snowy egret and the 
crested hoopoe, of light and affability and brill- 
iance. We shall soon be passing down the huge 
Acroceraunian Mountains, in among the islands 
scattered like a shivered necklace over the sea, — 
Zante, Cephalonia, Cerigo, — islands full of wine 
and sharp aromatic scents, silver-leaved olives 
and glowing oleander. There is indescribable 
refreshment in this light, buoyant air. Though it 
is hot, there is an elasticity and a joyousness in 
it that does not inspire languor. It is not the 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 27 

attar-of-roses atmosphere of Italy. There is a 
spice of Greek airiness and lightsomeness in it, 
just the difference between a winged epigram of 
Archilochus and an ode of Petrarch. But yonder 
is Corfu in sight, — the city ! How it steals on 
one out of its sunny corner, with the high mount- 
ain behind, concealed, as it were, in the folds of 
this shining atmosphere. I wondered what we 
were making straight for. 

What a place of thronging memories is Corfu. 
The oldest sea-fight on record was fought by the 
Corcyraeans. Here harbored the great Athenian 
fleet before the fatal expedition to Sicily. A few 
miles off, in a small bay " hardly large enough," 
said Lord Byron, " for two frigates to manoeuvre 
in," took place the Battle of Actium. A little 
farther down, in 157 1, occurred the Battle of Le- 
panto. Innumerable souvenirs of Greeks and 
crusaders, Venetians and Turks, cluster about 
the place. Christian and profane have fought 
for it. Jew and Gentile have rested and wrestled 
there. Greek temples and grand Venetian forti- 
fications have crowned and still crown in part its 
lovely crags. The island is a spacious park, a 
paradise, in the sense of Xenophon and the Ori- 
ent, of currant vineyards, myrtle, arbutus, the glo- 
rious blossomed rhododaphne, gnarled olives, 
wild aloe and cactus, orange groves and mastic. 
Its situation is really incomparable. It is a kind 



28 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

of semicircle of tall, interlaced houses and for- 
tresses, Greek churches, ^ei/oSo^eta, arcaded prom- 
enades like an Italian city, and cypress-tufted 
slopes. How warm and soft-tinted the yellow 
and red houses looked in the brilliant sunset 
yesterday evening! With my glass I could al- 
most see what they had for table d'hote at the 
HevoSoyeiov K(x)vaTavTiv6v7ro\i<;, the first Greek hotel 
in the Levant I have seen. And what flight and 
tarantella-dance of swallows in the air over the 
steep roof and the minaret-like cypresses. The 
whole burg and town of Corfu glowed with rich- 
ness and harmony in the vesper light. In front, 
a lovely bit of color in the shape of the soft 
green Island of Vido thrown on the water like a 
great bed of green moss ; behind, the towering 
mountains of San Salvador, spotted and spangled 
in the rich gloom with little glistening white 
Greek villages ; opposite, the fine coast of Epirus, 
where cliff and crag seem to have performed a 
Pyrrhic dance, they seem to be so mountainously 
and marvelously heaped over one another ; in 
the eastern distance, the cloud-wreathed pinnacles 
of Pindus with the strange Ottoman villages of 
Albania clinging like eagles' nests to the inter- 
vening mountain-sides, — Mecca on one side and 
the Middle Ages on the other. Then the Arces 
Phceacum of Vergil, the split and splendid peaks 
on which rise the twin fortresses that guard this 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 2$ 

end of the town, how majestically they tower, — 
aerice fialunibes, — and how deservedly they have 
given a name to the island. The azure sea- 
siesta of perfect tranquillity we had been all the 
morning having, ceased when we gained the har- 
bor of Corfu. A joyous breeze sprang to meet 
us. The waves became wild and dashed in 
spray on the quays and ramparts of the town. 
The boats with their wild Greek mariners that 
flocked out to take us ashore had no little trouble 
in making headway. A crowd of hotel runners, 
like so many corsairs, boarded us and thrust 
their rival cards into our faces. " Hotel This ? " 
" Hotel That ? " And the omnipresent polyglot 
commissionnaire was there, too, with mouth wa- 
tering with Greek, Italian, English, French, or 
Arabic, ready to take you to the end of the 
world, — to Tasso's " Pultima Irlanda," if you 
would but give him your baggage. 

Our small list of passengers soon scattered, 
petticoated Albanian, slashed and caftaned Turk, 
and all. We were left to enjoy this gorgeous 
antechamber to the picture-gallery of the East all 
by ourselves. 

How the water shone and sparkled, shifted and 
shivered into foam, tossing the great barges up 
and down like cockle-shells and springing with 
almost human laughter up on the sides of the 
vessels. There were a good many ships in the 



30 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

harbor. I saw, for the first time, the flag of 
Greece waving from many of them, — blue and 
white horizontal stripe with a cross in the upper 
corner. A formidable-looking Greek iron-clad 
lay at anchor. Wild chatter of Greek and Italian 
and Lingua Franca was kept up all day in load- 
ing our ship and till late in the night. The 
Greek, as I have hitherto heard it, is neither 
sonorous nor melodious. It is a quick, nervous 
language and the speakers of it abound in shrugs 
and gesticulations. The fishermen and gondo- 
lieri who came out to us stand up as they row, a 
fashion universal in the Adriatic, and have their 
oars tied by a loop of rope to a single peg. In 
Venice there is a graceful fixture to attach the 
oar to, a support resembling a bent elbow, or the 
claw of an animal, often richly and artistically 
wrought, in which the oar is held up high above 
the side of the gondola, a fashion by which the 
gondoliere can put forth all his strength on his 
oar as he successively moves it forward or with- 
draws it. The Greek boatmen so far are brown- 
skinned, sharp-eyed, clamorous fellows, knowing 
well enough how to cry out " Barca, Signore ? " 
if you don't understand Romaic. It is no won- 
der Corfu is famed for its Romaika or Greek jig, 
to see these fellows dancing about in their boats, 
rowing like mad to get to the steamer first. They 
seem intuitively quite accomplished in it. For a 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 3 I 

wonder we did not arrive at Corfu on a festa ; 
for what with their formidable Lents and count- 
less saint's days, they are nearly always celebrat- 
ing something. 1 Corfu is full of Greek churches. 
There are Jews, too, in some thousands, who dwell 
apart in a Ghetto of their own. How sadly the 
Greek and Byzantine churches lack the graceful 
bell-towers of Italy, — those dainty belfries, dainti- 
est of which is Giotto's at Florence. The square, 
slender tower with the grouped round-arched 
windows, flower-like pilasters and sweet peal of 
bells so tremulously hanging, how they charm 
one as they rise up from the gardens of Tuscany 
and ring out the Angelus on a dewy morning. 
They are like human, hovering voices, these deli- 
cate bells, and to me they give a rare sweetness 
to the mourning mother church. 

In Byzantinism, however, there is something 
that frets one, a coldness, a formalism, an empty 
splendor and decorative art, an incessant bowing 
and scraping (which, by the way, is said to be the 
reason why dogs are never seen in Byzantine 
churches, from the stooping posture, as if about 
to pick up a stone) ; in short, an unapproachable- 

1 There are, I think, more than one hundred holidays in 
the Greek calendar. How well can we understand the 
" Greek calends " when one remembers their talent for pro- 
crastination, — the eternal manana ! mahana I (to-morrow ! 
to-morrow !) of a Spanish promise. 



32 GREEK VIGNETTES, 

ness which does anything but excite interest. 
They cluster all about these Greek villages. This 
morning I noticed an enormously fat old Greek 
gentleman on board fumbling, as it seemed, a ro- 
sary of amber 1 as he walked up and down. The 
church is said to have an immense hold on its 
communicants. This Sunday morning we awoke 
and found Cephalonia in sight, not so grand a 
series of Raphaelesque sketches before us on the 
horizon as on yesterday, but the same airy witch- 
ery of distant mountain forms, the same lapis 
lazuli water, the same crystalline atmosphere, the 
same Spenserian " watchet-blue " sky and vol- 
uptuous tints. The whole island is redolent of 
Homer. East of it lies Ithaca, 2 whose people 
are the cleverest of the Greeks, even to-day. A 
little north is Leucaclia, the isle of Sappho, and 
Paxo, famous for the legend of Pan which Milton 
and Mrs. Browning have embalmed — islands at 
this period full of scents of summer. It is im- 
possible to marshal all the checkered recollec- 
tions of these scenes through which we are pass- 
ing; while I am writing islands are heaving in 

1 Which afterwards, I found, was no rosary at all, but 
merely a sort of portable conductor to carry off the super- 
abundant vitality of a super-excitable people. They must 
be perpetually picking at something — better amber than 
pockets ! It is, as About would say, " icne habitude d" orient" 

2 See Schliemann's charming Ithaque, Peloponnese, Troie. 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 33 

sight and others are disappearing which were 
places of celebrity thousands of years ago, ■ — 
shrines of poetry, temples of adoration, fields on 
which waved the fire-colored wheat of Homer and 
which felt the wandering step of Tibullus, tem- 
ples of Jupiter before which Nero danced, con- 
vents where crusaders stopped to worship on 
their pilgrimages to the Holy Land, estates once 
owned by the friend of Cicero, and spots where 
Cicero himself once meditated. It is certainly a 
voyage of unsurpassable interest. Ithaca alone 
with its Homeric scenery would repay the archae- 
ological tourist. 

How present to my mind while I studied the 
beautiful Bay of Corfu were the gardens of Al- 
kinous ! I had been reading the Odyssey on the 
voyage across the Atlantic, and the whole was 
fresh in my memory. Corfu, the ancient Scheria 
of Homer, where Ulysses was cast away, was 
rescued by Nausikaa when she went down to 
wash the clothes, was clothed hospitably in the 
royal garments themselves, and in them was rec- 
ognized by the watchful mother of the maiden. 
I can imagine Alkinous' lovely gardens and pali- 
saded court looming out over this entrancing 
bay, a scene of pre-historic beauty and simplicity, 
whose very rudeness was refined away by the 
elaborate cunning of the air, the far withdrawn 
wool-white cloud, the intervening veil of down- 
3 



34 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

drifting sea-blue air, the sea itself sending up 
paint and spume to light up whatever primitive 
Ka\v/3rj it might be and bring it out on the twi- 
light heights like a star ! These islands are full 
of uncouth Greek shepherds and sharp watch- 
dogs. A passage of Aristotle is unexpectedly 
explained by reference to their habit of attacking 
strangers. 1 Little cabins and huts dot the crags 
here and there, crags of every gay color. The 
limestone is gnarled and sculptured by the sea 
into huge caverns and grots. Just before me 
now the magnificent declivities of Monte Nero 
(nearly six thousand feet high) glimmer through 
the sunny mist that broods over them like the 
white cliffs of England, declivities of bleached 
and blanched limestone almost painfully bright in 
this quivering air. The sun smites on them at 
times blindingly. We wound up the long Gulf of 
Argostoli this morning and stopped for an hour 
or two. Pale, Luxuri, Crani, and Argostoli lie in 
this river-like fiord. The island is over one hun- 
dred and twenty miles in circumference, and this 
side of it is full of towns. The houses all seem 
large and well built, embosomed in trees. I saw 
quantities of aloe growing wild. On this fiord 
there is a subterranean channel burrowed in the 

1 Cf. Schliemann's amusing experience in Ithaca, when he 
saved himself from a fierce Ithacan dog by doing as the old 
Greeks did in similar cases, — sitting down. 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 35 

rock down which the sea flows. The current is 
strong enough to turn an immense iron grist-mill 
wheel which I saw in motion. Cephalonia lacks 
the truly Ionian luxuriousness of Corfu, but its 
poesy is of the heroic measure. Vast convents, 
admirable roads, a great Venetian fortress or two, 
sunny sweeps of sloping currant vineyards, blue 
and pink churches with Greek inscriptions, for- 
ests of olives, stormy-looking mountains, to-day 
wrapped in clouds, — such are some of the points 
of the island. Numerous boats, as usual, came 
out to meet us, and there was the usual squabble 
over passengers. I noticed one boat with Calli- 
ope spelt with one / in Greek characters on her 
stern. What a mobile, irritable people they seem 
to be. 1 The Cephaloniots appear better-looking 
than any I have seen, and I saw more blond hair. 
One of our passengers, a Greek, with sky-blue 
umbrella, pea-green parrot in a red cage and end- 
less baskets, got off here, much to my relief. The 
Greeks we have had on board have been any- 
thing but agreeable-looking, above the medium 
size, and consummate chatter-boxes. Shall I 
modify my opinion in the light of Aristophanes ? 
Not even the ancient fleas, bugs, and spongers 
escaped this keen observer, nor does he indeed 
seem to have escaped them ! This evening we 
get to Zante (Zacynthus), our last stopping-place, 
1 Cf. in confirmation, Tuckerman's "EA^vef rfjg X^/LtEpov. 



36 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

I believe, till we exchange boats at Syra for 
Athens. Athens ! Can I realize it ? Did I realize 
Rome till its sad majesty had passed from my 
sight and I thought over it in the long winter 
nights at home ? It must sink deep like Tyrian 
purple into every tissue of one's nature, and then 
one may realize it. 

But here is another big island on my right, 
which I had not noticed ! It is a Balaklava of isl- 
ands, — this Ionian Sea. As fast as one is slain, 
another rises. 

And here is Ithaca with its cluster of heroic 
memories, — a stone memoir of Odysseus and Pe- 
nelope. How singularly rich in archaeological or 
rather aesthetic interest is this island. Gandar, 
Wordsworth, Lilienstern, Bowen, Leake, Schrei- 
ber, Koliades, Sir William Gell, Strabo, and 
Plotemy all identify it with the Ithaca of Homer. 
It lies along the eastern coast of Cephalonia, a 
grouped and glorious mass of picturesque rock, 
full of small towns, keen-witted people, dogs, and 
sunlight ! One may get a boat in Cephalonia as 
Schliemann did and go over to Ithaca in an hour, 
provided one have the famous Homeric tail- 
breeze. " Hungry and tired as I was," says the 
enthusiastic doctor, " I was immensely glad to 
find myself in the native land of the hero whose 
story I had read a hundred times with the great- 
est delight. I was fortunate enough to find on 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 37 

disembarking the famous miller Panagis Asproi- 
eraca who for four francs let me have his donkey 
to carry my things while he himself served me as 
guide and cicerone to the capital, Vathy. Learning 
that I had come to Ithaca to make archaeological 
researches, he applauded my undertaking warmly 
and recounted to me as we walked all the advent- 
ures of Ulysses from beginning to end. The 
volubility with which he told them proved to me 
that he had told the same thing a thousand times 
before. His enthusiasm to tell me all about 
Ithaca was so great that he did not tolerate in- 
terruption. In vain I asked him, ' Is that the 
Grotto of the Nymphs ? Where is Laertes' Field ? J 
All my questions remained unanswered. The 
road was long, but so was the story, and at length 
when after midnight we found the threshold of 
his house at Vathy, we were just entering hell 
with the souls of the suitors under the guidance 
of Mercury. I congratulated him smartly on 
having read the poems of Homer and retain- 
ing them well enough to repeat in modern Greek 
the principal incidents of the twenty-four cantos 
of the Odyssey. To my great amazement he an- 
answered that he not only knew nothing of the an- 
cient Greek, but that he could not read or write 
the modern ! He said that he knew the adventures 
of Ulysses by tradition. I asked then whether 
the tradition was general among the people of 



38 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

Ithaca or whether it was confined to his family. 
He said that his family really was the depositary 
of it, and that nobody in the island knew the 
story of the great king as well as he did, but 
that everybody had a confused notion of it. 

There is no hotel in the capital of Ithaca, though 
the town has 2,500 inhabitants and is situated at 
the head of the Gulf of Molo, one of the best 
ports in the world. The total population of the 
island (1868) is 13,000, and its length about 
twenty-nine kilometers. It is a chain of calcare- 
ous rocks. The Gulf of Molo divides it into two 
almost equal parts, connected by an isthmus eight 
hundred yards wide, on which towers Mount JEtos 
crowned by vast ruins, called TraXatoKaorrpov, de- 
scribed by tradition as the ruins of the palace of 
Ulysses. Rains and dews, once so abundant in 
Ithaca, are very infrequent and trees are rare, 
and the immense wheat harvest of the Odyssey 
is now reduced to a fourth of what is necessary 
for the sustenance of the inhabitants. Currants 
and olive oil are the staple products of Ithaca. 
The wine is thrice as strong as Bordeaux, and is 
consumed at home. In spite of the excessive 
heat of the island, the climate is very healthy, 
and deserves the eulogies of Homer. 

Bowen is right in saying that there is perhaps 
not a place in the world where classic souvenirs 
are so vivid and so few. The little rock with- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 39 

drew into obscurity immediately after the epoch 
of its first legendary hero and poet, and so it has 
remained for nearly three thousand years. In con- 
trast with many once glorious countries, Ithaca 
ow r es none of its illustriousness to more recent 
times. Indeed, the very name of Ithaca is hardly 
penned by a post-Homeric author except in allu- 
sion to its poetic celebrity. Here, then, all our 
recollections are concentrated round the heroic 
age ; every hill and rock, every spring and olive- 
grove is redolent of Homer and the Odyssey ; and 
one is transported at a single bound over a hun- 
dred generations into the most brilliant era of 
Greek poetry and chivalry." 

Many of Homer's localities are described with 
such accuracy that they are recognizable to-day 
from his descriptions. Thus the Grotto of the 
Nymphs is a masterpiece of minute truthfulness 
in landscape painting. Truly Homeric are the 
agricultural instruments, or rather is the agricult- 
ural implement (for they have but one, — the 
pointed hoe) of the Ithacans. With this they 
scratch the earth and win a scant and laborious 
subsistence. Dr. Schliemann found what he sup- 
posed to be the palace of Ulysses on top of 
Mount JEtos. He brings a stream of archaeo- 
logical light to play on the Cyclopean walls and 
cistern which he found, and covers all over with 
the ivy of inexhaustible quotation. So great was 



40 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

the interest he felt amid the ruins of the palace 
that he forgot the blaze of heat, hunger, and 
thirst, devoured the legendary descriptions of the 
spot in the Odyssey, and sat entranced over the 
magnificent panorama that unrolled before his 
eyes, and which is hardly inferior to the vision 
from Mount ^Etna in Sicily. 

To the north lies Leucadia with Cape Ducato, 
so famous in antiquity for Sappho's leap, from 
which unfortunate lovers cast themselves, per- 
suaded that this would cure their passion, a spot 
celebrated for the leap of Sappho, the poet 
Nicostratos, Deucalion, Artemisia, and others. 
Strabo tells us that at the feast of Apollo the 
Leucadians had the habit of casting a criminal 
from this rock into the sea as an expiatory sac- 
rifice for all the crimes of the people. Masses 
of feathers and living birds were attached to him 
to assist his flight, and fisher-boats lay drawn up 
in circles below to pick him up and save him, if 
possible. 

On the south are the noble mountains of Pel- 
oponnesus ; in the east the grand peaks of Ac- 
arnania ; at one's feet is the beautiful spot be- 
yond which float the mountains of Cephalonia 
as if rising vertically out of the water. With 
this Miltonic vision before him it is no wonder 
Dr. Schliemann grows poetic and overflows with 
classic reminiscence. Accordingly he plunged 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 41 

at once into excavations, hired laborers, went to 
work on Ulysses' palace, and discovered fune- 
rary urns which he thought not improbably once 
held the ashes of Penelope and her spouse ! 
Intolerable heat, wretched fare, and the one hun- 
dred and fifty Greek feasts and holidays did not 
interrupt this poetic infatuation. Five rare vases 
rewarded all this zeal, which was followed, not 
by a fever, as one would reasonably expect in 
• the white heat of the Greek summer, but by a 
tour of the island, readings, and declamations 
from the Odyssey to delighted audiences of 
Ithacans, friendships with the solitary shepherds 
and their flocks, and boundless sentiment and 
effusion. If the arrival of a stranger in the cap- 
ital was an event, infinitely more so was his prog- 
ress through the provinces. " Scarcely had I 
sat down when all the people of the village 
thronged around me and inundated me with ques- 
tions. To cut matters short, I read them the 
twenty-fourth chapter of the Odyssey from the 
205th to the 412th verse, translating verse by 
verse into their vernacular. Immense was their 
enthusiasm on hearing me declaim in the sono- 
rous language of Homer, the language of their 
ancestors three thousand years ago, the story of 
the frightful miseries the old king Laertes had 
endured in the very place where we were assem- 
bled, and the picture of exquisite joy which he 



42 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

had felt on meeting in this very place, after twen- 
ty years' separation, his cherished son Ulysses 
whom he had believed dead. All eyes were filled 
with tears, and when I ended, men, women, and 
children embraced me saying, MeydXrjv x a pw /*as 

€/<a/xes • Kara ttoWol ae e^aptcrTw/xei/ (Thou hast 
given us great joy • many thanks). I was led in 
triumph to the village, where they vied in lavish- 
ing hospitality on me without wishing to accept 
any remuneration." Thus the poetic doctor went 
round like a wandering rhapsode, reading and 
reciting to adoring crowds, shedding the divine 
verses of Homer like a sweet perfume over their 
isolated existences, and being rewarded by tears 
of sympathy and delight. One can imagine the 
effect which such recitations would make on the 
vivid and impressionable people of the Ionian 
Sea. 

The people of Ithaca are frank and loyal, 
chaste and pious to a point, bright-witted, labo- 
rious, clean, and sympathetic. Prudence and wis- 
dom — characteristics of their great ancestors — 
are theirs too. Adultery is regarded among them 
as a crime second only to parricide, and those 
detected in it are pitilessly put to death. Hardly 
one in fifty can read or write, but what they want 
in culture they supply by mother-wit. The sim- 
ple inhabitants of Ithaca, just as in the rest of 
Greece, thee-and-thou you. Even the king is 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 43 

thus addressed (Set?, thou). They are extremely 
patriotic and proud of their nationality. Dr. 
Schliemann says that whenever he met an Itha- 
can in his oriental journeys and inquired his 
country, he got the response : Et/xat 'WaKrjonos /m 
tov ®e6v ! (I 'm from Ithaca, by Jove !) 

Another proof of the influence of souvenirs is 
the quantity of Penelopes, Ulysseses, and Telema- 
chuses to be found in Ithaca. These names have 
an undying charm for the imagination of the Itha- 
cans. In one point they do not resemble their 
famous progenitor, — no beggars are to be seen in 
the islands. The clergy here as elsewhere in the 
East is unsalaried, and subsists on the meagre 
income from baptisms, burials, and marriages. 
Hence the Greek priest, iran-iras, as they call him 
(how like the iravovpyeov tov ira-mru* of Theophas- 
tus !), has to struggle continually with poverty, 
and as there is no career open for him, he be- 
comes ignorant and animalized. A piquant 
Greek proverb about him runs thus : — 

'A/Xa#0)S KCU KCLK07]6u}<Sj 

'AKafjLGLTrjs koX <£ayas, 
Oi>oeV irXlov h\v tov fxevei 
Uapa va yevrj izarras} 

Thus as one journeys through these happy 

1 Which may be paraphrased thus : " Ignorance, idle- 
ness, and gluttony make the Greek priest." 



44 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

islands a thousand recollections throng over one 
till the whole archipelago becomes dramatized 
and every islet is a verse in an epic poem. How 
much our interest in Corfu increases when we 
remember that Antony and Octavia were married 
there ; that it offered an asylum to Themistocles ; 
that Aristotle took such delight in its vernal 
beauty that he persuaded Alexander to visit it. 
Then the arrival of Titus there after the con- 
quest of Jerusalem ; St. Helena going to Pales- 
tine to look for the true cross ; Augustus and 
Diocletian ; Cato and Nero ; and last, but not 
least, the foot-prints of the blind Belisarius ! 1 

We are just running into the harbor of Zante, 
after Corfu the most picturesque and stately I 
have seen in the Ionian. How true is the prov- 
erb, "Zante, Zante, Fior di Levanti!" Another 
oasis of verdure in this blue water-Sahara. Its 
harbor is like a half-moon or a sickle, a miniature 
Naples. Nor is Vesuvius wanting, for a splendid 
twin-peaked mountain rises on the left and 
makes the resemblance nearly complete. Nearly 
every twenty years the place is shaken to pieces 
by an earthquake. The harbor is full of shipping 
and the white houses and steeples come out 
prominently in the sun. A strong land breeze is 
blowing. There is a lovely tassel of historic 
memories hanging to its caftan, too, — early Athe- 
1 Tuckerman's 'Efthqveg ttjq 2r}[iepov. 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 45 

nian and Peloponnesian charms and glories, Vene- 
tian supremacies and noble demeanor in the 
Greek war of liberation, etc. Feluccas are dart- 
ing about everywhere. The coast of Pelopon- 
nesus away off is plainly visible to the southeast 
with Olympian Elis dimly discernible. There is 
an oriental tint to everything. They even say 
that the latticed windows of the East were preva- 
lent here at no distant date, and that the un- 
married women here and through the other isl- 
ands live in Turkish seclusion. No wonder, in 
this all-revealing air ! The quay is thronged with 
Zantiot idlers, a Greek canaille as curious as ever 
the old Athenians were. Alt the people literally 
seem to be in the streets, which at the side are 
arcaded over like the Rue de Rivoli. Venetian 
campaniles point heavenward here and there. 
The town is very shallow in depth, and does not 
look as if it extended more than a quarter of a 
mile back, being hemmed in by lofty mountains. 
Snow-white convents and churches hang conspic- 
uously to the cliffs in every direction. 

I see no costumes, only a caftan here and 
there. A multitude of straw wide-awakes line the 
adjacent quays. Some of the church groups are 
very pretty, with walls white as milk, corniced with 
blue and yellow, and a gate surmounted by a 
graceful Byzantine arch in blue and white almost 
like the quartering of an escutcheon. Other 



46 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

churches and groups are of mellower coloring, — 
one group, for example, stained pink with bright 
green blinds and gray battlemented wall running 
round it, and grave-toned tiled roof. A Greek 
convent, just touched and trembled over by the 
sunset light, is built on the highest mountain-top. 
I see the Byzantine dome and the long line of 
sunset-painted windows. What tender serenity 
reigns up there, w r hat calmness and summer light 
and night, what peace and plenitude of beauty. 

Our vessel is unloading strange-looking bags 
and firkins and packages in a huge green and 
black barge like Ulysses' schedia with the Homeric 
i/aa at stern and stem, huge cross-beams, looped 
oarlocks, etc. On the western side are many 
pictorial groups ; enormous aloes, feathery palms, 
sinewy cypresses ; gardens fenced in by high 
walls and full of aromatic shrubs ; a mighty barge 
taking horses ashore blinded; round-windowed, 
zebra-striped houses streaked white and brown 
on top ; wind-mills turning high up in the clear, 
evening air ; fantastic-looking sail-boats swooping 
swiftly up and down like white-winged swallows ; 
a lunar crescent of sparkling blue water in which 
our ship is anchored ; distant cries coming melo- 
diously over the water ; dogs barking in the dis- 
tance ; a boat painted the gaudiest blue and yellow 
just going by full of Zantiot sailors and peasants, 
the rhythmic beat of oars in the water, the 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 47 

" Basta ! Basta ! " of the Italian and the indescrib- 
able ejaculations of the Greek, — what a combina- 
tion of sights and sounds ! There is no twilight 
here worth speaking of. The sun has but just 
set and the water is already steely with approach- 
ing dusk, while the sharp-sculptured heights back 
of Zante that a moment ago stood out like the 
blade of a scimiter are already growing dull. 
The air is delightful. Surely the climate of the 
Levant has been slandered. I know it is infi- 
nitely hotter in Virginia. The thermometer can- 
not this evening be more than 72 or 73 . Either 
the air has a peculiar resonance, or the songs of 
the Greek gamins ashore are peculiarly penetrat- 
ing, for I hear them distinctly, even conversation 
and children's voices. We are some distance 
from the shore. 

The shops seem to be all shut up. Are the 
Greeks so strict on Sunday? I know their 
church is wrapped about them with the grip of 
the Laocoon, but I thought the " Ionian haggler" 
was always ready. Their singing is singularly 
sweet : listen to this boatful of boys just going by. 
The song is quaint and wild as the one the 
Sirens sang to Ulysses, and who knows but it 
may be as ancient ? The Swedish music is rich 
and singular, but somehow this touches me more. 
Is it the charm of association? Presently this 
whole amphitheatre will light up as Corfu did and 



48 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

throw a thousand trembling lights on the water. 
The bells are ringing vespers, — shrill, castrati 
bells, without the mellow music of Italian bells. 
How much character the Italians know how to 
give their bells. How those deep bells up in the 
great companiles of Venice delighted and deaf- 
ened me with their clangor. I felt a positive 
awe in their presence; and as they all but one 
began to thunder out the sunset ave I felt like a 
poor fly being bell-bombarded. I think the bell- 
ringer enjoyed my dismay. What a sunset it was 
that evening at Venice, and what a post of obser- 
vation I had ! The great tower up which Napo- 
leon had ridden on horseback; the gorgeous 
mosque-like San Marco and airy Venice at my 
feet ; the far-off lagoons and mountains effulgent 
with such beatitudes of light as Claude and Tur- 
ner knew; the Adriatic made to lift up its jeweled 
isles to catch the smile of benediction of that 
light ; the response of the other bells in marvelous 
antiphonal tumult. — The lamps begin to sparkle 
on shore. This is my first Sunday in the Levant ! 
I have spent it partially in the intoxication of the 
scenery, partially in studying out a difficult Italian 
novel. 

Mount Skopos at Zante is a very singular for- 
mation. Between it and the Castle Hill on the 
other side runs the Vale of Zante, a sea of fertil- 
ity. It is from six to eight miles wide, and ex- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 49 

tends across the whole island. Delightful are 
the spring and harvest time in this island, when 
the island fills the surrounding seas with almond 
blossoms and orange fragrance, or when the cur- 
rant vineyards hang laden with luscious fruit. 
There are strange nests on poles, constructed out 
of leaves and thatch, which are put in the vine- 
yards and have a guard stationed in them to 
watch the fruit day and night. The whole island 
is full of villas and gentlemen's country seats, 
where the Ionian gentlemen exercise a courteous 
hospitality. Think of the thorn of an earthquake 
in the side of this Eden ! Opposite the Bay of 
Zante, to the southeast, is the coast of Elis and 
Olympia. Think of being almost in sight of 
these memorable places and not being allowed 
to land ! x Passengers going to Olympia land at 
Zante and engage a boat to take them across to 
Patras, whence mule-back to the seat of the ex- 
cavations. 

This morning (Monday) the sea is without a 
ripple except what is made by our ship. We 
are running very close to the Peloponnesian coast ; 
what part of it I do not precisely know, but I 
can discern with the naked eye numerous towns 
and hamlets stuck in between the mountains, and 
on a precipitous crag a mediaeval castle. The 

1 See Lang's Peloponnesiche Wanderung, the reports of 
Hirschfeld, Adler, and C urtius, etc. 
4 



50 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

mountains are absolutely bare, of the softest 
and mellowest tints, gray, white, pink, streaked, 
russet-brown, lovely warm neutral tints, and sil- 
very nuances. I cannot fix them long enough 
to analyze their characteristics, but the combined 
effect is delicious. Now and then the mountains 
open and let you see far up them, rising hundreds, 
perhaps thousands, of feet sheer up out of the 
ultramarine blue of the sea. The coast even 
now has an autumnal look. There is the pathos 
and decay of indefinable autumn all about them. 
Nothing could be more majestic than their ever- 
vanishing, ever-flickering profiles, now sweeping 
to the sea in a lustrous cape, now towering into 
an immense head-land, or shooting out in a fan- 
tastic promontory, or again huddled together in a 
grand aggregation of choral and symphonic rock. 
Many of them are at this moment caressed by 
hovering banks of cloud, white as an egret's 
wing, that throw their sharp shadows on the 
naked mountains like silhouettes from some mag- 
ical camera. Each rock is a study of color and 
form in itself, and the variety is infinite. As far 
as the eye can see, the Mediterranean stretches 
out like an immense inland lake, until it impinges 
on this unconquerable coast. Sky and sea, like 
Christ's coat, are without seam of juncture. I 
see irregular stone fences, rude terraces and 
steps, and the whiter courses of mountain tor- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 51 

rents all about over the mountains. Shepherds' 
huts, too, and little bays and indentations where 
there is a tiny harbor and a house or two, shel- 
ter for a felucca in stress, or ports where boats 
can touch and get their load of currants, which 
are now universally cultivated in the Pelopon- 
nesus. 

On the lips of these peasants many a phrase 
may still be found that is familiar to the classical 
scholar. 1 The contour of the mountains is soft 
as a mezzotint. There is a half-moonlike stretch 
of coast just now before my eyes, which for soft 
and sunny and exquisite shape and coloring is 
unrivaled. I never saw such transfiguring air 
as this : mountains that would be indescribably 
bald and repulsive elsewhere are here transformed 
into a fairy-land of beauty. I cannot even discern 
a prickly aloe or a cactus on many of these, yet 
they are as vivid and brilliant as the richest water- 
color painting. What a noble cape is this we are 
just now turning ; not a human habitation or a 
tree to be seen, and yet such a bit of glorious 
color as Turner would have luxuriated in ; not a 
sisterhood of pallid cliffs, but a mighty mountain- 
ous mass of variegated hue. It is, I believe, 

1 Cf. Bernliardt Schmidt's Volksleben der Neugriexheit. 
If Thackeray found the very eyes of the French girls full of 
idiom, one might say that the very outlines of this coast are 
written in the Greek character. 



52 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

Cape Gallo. We passed Sphacteria and Nava- 
rino a little earlier in the morning. Between 
Capes Gallo and Matapan lies a deep indentation 
fringed with high mountains, a fairy gulf which 
we are this moment crossing. The Peloponnesus 
here forms a series of gulfs which with their three 
capes, Malea, Matapan, and Gallo, give the lower 
end of the peninsula the aspect of an antique 
Louis XIV. slipper. Platea, Areopolis, and Kit- 
ries would be in sight with a powerful glass. 
Continually my eyes are called away to gaze on 
this most dazzling water laid out before me as 
smooth as the purple lotos-blossoms I once saw 
at Kew Gardens, with long sinuosities and rivers 
of mirror-like calm, as if but recently furrowed 
there by a vessel. Pale and perpendicular hang 
the mountains over its edges, as if fascinated by 
their own spectre-like loveliness. No ormolu 
work could be richer than this magnificent nat- 
ural frame. Over Cape Gallo is anchored a won- 
derful fleet of cirrus-cumuli, sowing its mountains 
with opaque-clear shadows like smoked crystal. 
The waves run from us in long, lateral, foamless 
swells like the undulations of a corn-field. In- 
land more than one classic peak pierces the air : 
Mount Ithome, the famous mountains that hem 
in Sparta on the west, Pyrgos, Messene, and 
others famed in song and story. I never im- 
agined a coast so lovely. On my map this gulf 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 53 

is nameless, but it certainly deserves a name, for 
a more transcendent landscape it would be diffi- 
cult to mention. Over and over again it recalls 
the voluptuous lakes of Italy. The Gulf of 
Corinth is a singular scene of placid glory. Is 
it any wonder that the Greeks loved the sea? 
How full of this sentiment is the Greek Anthol- 
ogy, is the Odyssey, is the exquisite muse of 
Theocritus ! Did not Homer in his continually 
recurring phrase of the " hoary sea " mean that 
silvery whiteness that films these seas when seen 
aslant, a reflection of the almost incandescent 
whiteness of the sky? It is like hoar-frost on 
sapphire. The sea, while deeply, wonderfully 
blue when you look right down into it, gives off 
a silver-white, senescent radiance when you look 
at it from another angle, — the radiance of hoary 
hair or white lilies in blue water; and this 
brought out the more conspicuously by the long 
ruddy spits of land that shoot forth into the sea 
and give a strange warmth to the scene. The 
silver accent is on everything, on the olive-leaves, 
on the asphodels of Homer, on the wild aloes, 
on the birch trunks that thickly clothe the higher 
mountains here and there, on the far-off silvery 
horizon, on the exquisite smile of white sand that 
breaks at the foot of these crags, on the sea itself 
in its multitudinous crests and white caps, on the 
very gulls that float like silver eros-bows in the 



54 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

shadowless air. And more than all perhaps in 
the clouds. To-day there has been breathless 
calm, and this effect has been beautifully brought 
out, — the sky unimaginably white, the sea un- 
imaginably blue, the offspring an indescribable 
hoariness fired with sapphire. 

We are now rounding Cerigo and passing be- 
tween it and an island — a stupendous chocolate- 
colored rock rising vertically from the sea. It 
looks like an enormous sea-sponge, and stands in 
beautiful and unique isolation, like the cone of 
a submerged mountain peak or the crown of 
a Titan's hat, opposite the Cytherean coast of 
which it is a dependency. A slender, spectre- 
like silhouette of mountains hangs on the south- 
east horizon — Crete. Would not one expect 
Venus with her doves to rise up out of this en- 
chanted sea and take her flight visibly before one ? 
The sea has the susurrus of those delicious verses 
where she is described in Horace as winging her 
way to Paphos and Cnidus. In the neighbor- 
hood is the scene of the legend of Arion, the 
lovely singer, returning laden with the wealth of 
kings when, attacked by the pirates, he asked to 
sing one more song to his lyre, and then sprang 
into the sea, — a legend over which even Lucian 
forgot to jest, and became sentimental. Arion 
was borne ashore by the mourning dolphins. A 
vision on the horizon lies Melos, where, about 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 55 

the time the great Napoleon died, Heine's " Our 
Lady of Beauty," the Venus of Milo, was found, 
— ■ decay and resurrection ! 

We have steamed into the Bay of Rapsali, a 
scene of delightful beauty ! Rapsali is a crag 
surmounted by a mediaeval fort, perched white 
and inaccessible in the air. A snow-white Greek 
church with quaint steeple looks over the castle 
wall ; behind nestles a white town full of large 
stone houses with strange Eastern-looking towers, 
lines of huge, round arched arcades like the 
arches of an aqueduct, and fields of golden grain 
for which the soil has been laboriously scratched 
together and held in by stone walls ; at the foot 
of the fortressed crag another town on the beach 
with a heaven-y-pointing palm or two waving be- 
hind, a forest of huge olives, groups of blossoming 
aloes sending aloft a long shaft of flowers, a shelv- 
ing pebbly beach in front, low one-story houses 
like warehouses, painted or stained white with yel- 
low window frames and green blinds. The houses 
have a strangely unfinished look, from the fact 
that there are neither eaves nor cornice ; peasant 
huts everywhere, built of rude stones, with tufts of 
golden grain and bright green foliage dotting the 
steep mountains. The surf breaks musically on 
the shore, near which as at Naples the water has 
prismatic streaks on it, coming from the shallow- 
ness of the sea and the white bottom on which 



56 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

the sunbeams strike and break up. A wind-mill 
and a light-house here and there. It is a beauti- 
ful solitary spot. The people were expecting 
us, for as soon as we hove in sight, boats put 
out to meet us, and there was the wrangle and 
jangle of voices to which I am gradually accus- 
toming myself. On the highest mountain-top is 
another Byzantine chapel, with its apse strangely 
turned to the sea. I did not have quite time 
enough to take in the clustering city before we 
started. What a noble situation for the sumpt- 
uous temple of Venus which Pausanius mentions 
is the Isle of Cerigo. The whole coast abounds 
in caverns, some of which are said to be of sin- 
gular beauty. I can see them as we pass. As- 
tarte has left her sweetness behind in the honey 
for which Cythera is famed. The island seems 
put here for nothing in the world but to make a 
most lovely picture. It has no bays or harbors 
or rivers worth speaking of ; its peasantry are 
wild and scattered ; the grain fields are now just 
gilding a few spots with their fruitful gold ; the 
coast is savage and cavernous ; there is scant 
vegetation in its ruddy and rocky glens, and it is 
visited only by the quails with preference. 

What a spot of beauty on these laughing, lumi- 
nous seas ! We are sailing round it, and new and 
richer landscapes are breaking on us. The after- 
noon sun tinges everything with a tenderness like 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 57 

the softest enamel. One's eyes are nearly out 
with gazing through opera-glasses at these kalei- 
doscopic changes, these Protean metamorphoses, 
this succession and procession of most beauteous 
mountain forms. It is like turning over leaf 
after leaf of a living Odyssey — and ever the sea 
comes in with a low chime as of murmurous 
nereids, through the fluted, organ-like sea-grots 
and echoing caverns. And singularly forsaken 
seems this sea. How seldom we meet a vessel ! 
This morning, for a wonder, there was a steamer 
in sight — now and then, a peak-sailed schooner 
hugging the shore. The region is like the dead 
Mediterranean itself, which has no tide and nei- 
ther ebbs nor flows. So the scenery on the Sea 
of Sodom has the same unearthly brilliance. 
Life and light are coincident, and yet in this 
land of light how dead it is ! 

We arrived at Syra early yesterday morning, 
and transhipped from the Orestes to the Lucifer 
early this morning. Fourth of July in Greece ! 
The incongruity would seem almost absurd if one 
did not connect 1776 with 776, — the foundation 
of culture with its declaration of independence. 
My fourths of July have certainly been varied, 
many of them spent on the Atlantic, as I have 
had birthdays in many lands. I have never been 
more dazzled than I was at the first glimpse of 
Syra — cloudless calm, the most golden expanse 



58 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

of illuminated water, blue and breathless light 
over everything, and Syra in the foreground with 
Hermoupolis, its capital, whitening the shore 
and climbing the conical mountain behind. The 
baldest, nakedest mountains around, but so be- 
jeweled and bewitched by this transcendent cli- 
mate that they excel in beauty the most luxuriant 
of forest-clad heights. And this is the ^Egean 
Sea, too, and opposite is Delos, the Holy Isle 
and sun of the Cyclades, about which these wan- 
dering isles revolved in the antique imagination, 
thousand-fold sacred with associations of Apollo 
and Artemis. Rhenea lies in front, an island 
once chained by a Greek tyrant to Delos as an 
offering to the divinities. Paros, the marble 
home of our divinest statues, is a tranquil spot 
of aerial mountain-line to the southeast, — a spot 
wrangled over for thirty years no long time ago, 
with the Greek government and a private indi- 
vidual as parties to the law-suit. Andros and 
Mykonos face us to the northeast. In fact, we 
are in the maelstrom of the JEgean, caught in the 
whirl of bright isles and all' be-meshed and en- 
tangled in poetic memories. How different are 
these islands from the Ionian ! As different as 
the most luxuriant fertility can be from the most 
utter nudeness. What do these ^Egeans live on ? 
No such question needed to be asked among the 
vines and olives and pomegranates of Corfu and 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 59 

Zante. But here there seems to be absolutely 
nothing except mountains of mica, slate, marble, 
and granite. The harbor is full of ships, too — 
brigs and brigantines, barks, schooners, steam- 
ships, corsair-like vessels with slender hulls and 
huge sails, innumerable barche and barcarole with 
their sailors standing up as they row, even a 
mighty Austrian man-of-war with a band of music 
and formidable port-holes with cannon peeping 
out. Syra is then the Cyclad of the Cyclades, 
the centre of the steam life of the Levant, the 
universal calling point for out-going and in-com- 
ing steamers, and the point of transhipment for 
Athens. Why this island precisely should have 
been selected I do not know, except its harbor 
is deep and spacious, and it is full of a lively, 
restless population attracted here for apparently 
incomprehensible reasons. The town contains 
at least thirty thousand inhabitants (with forty 
thousand horse-power), a theatre, several cathe- 
drals and casinos, and some large factories, and 
is the seat of an extensive trade. It gives one 
a more perfect idea of what, in a measure, an 
ancient town must have been, than any I have 
seen. It really — even the telegraph, steam com- 
munications, and churches — looks like a resus- 
citated Pompeii. The houses are built of crys- 
talline limestone, many of them highly polished, 
with beautiful marble porticoes and plinths, mar- 



60 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

ble steps and window frames, niches with sculpt- 
ured figures in them, battlements with light bal- 
ustrade often surmounted by a small temple, 
quaint ornamented chimneys, arcades upheld by 
marble pillars, and tiny gardens full of acacias, 
fig-trees, and trellised vines. The majority of 
them are perfectly square, two-storied, without 
cornice or gabled roof, stained brilliant white 
with a bright blue or pale green band running 
round the top ; square or Roman windows with 
green Venetian blinds, behind which hang lace 
curtains and hover faces always curiously on the 
lookout. Veiled women occasionally pass you, 
though the majority of the Syrote women seem 
to go without any covering for the head except a 
light silk parasol. The gamins in the street have 
the blackest hair I ever saw, with pure olive 
complexions and aquiline noses. They bathe all 
day long on the mole in this beautifully clear, 
clean water. There is the prismatic sheen on it 
I have so often noticed. JDolphins and sea- 
urchins abound in these waters ; there is even a 
group of islands which the Greeks called Echin- 
ades, — poetic old fellows ! — from their resem- 
blance to hedge-hogs. They were always, with 
an infinitely fertile fancy, coining epithets and 
conceiving similitudes, likening one island to the 
antlers of a stag, calling another the isle of 
roses, and describing others as sown (Sporades) 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 6 1 

over the sea. They did the same with the stars, 
unraveling the intricacies of those skeins of gold- 
en light and weaving them again into a garment 
of gorgeous myths. How beautifully the constel- 
lations flash on us from the Greek poets ! To 
each one there is hung the medallion of some 
exquisite epithet which itself has a touch of star- 
riness in it. I could not help thinking of it as 
I looked at the heavens last night, — so brill- 
iantly pure, so softly scintillant. They hung 
there like fruits of Aladdin's garden, each star 
bedded in it's case of velvet air like a brilliant. 
The city was one mass of mantling light elon- 
gated in the water as we arrived. I went into 
the cathedral and admired the polished marble 
of its interior, with the vaulted roof stained light 
blue, and colored glass in the Byzantine dome. 
The blue and white of the Greek national colors 
appear everywhere, even in the churches. These 
Greek churches do not produce the effect of the 
dim Gothic. They are too full of light, and 
have a Protestant clearness. The two towers of 
this cathedral are very pretty, light elaborately 
wrought open work marble, surmounted by a 
graceful belfry. Another church which I visited 
was most beautiful, with its marble cloisters and 
dainty cornice. I could not tell whether it was 
a convent or a church; probably both. I did 



62 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

not go in. 1 Windmills whirl on every height. In 
one place there are six of them in a row, facing 
one of the most wonderful views of the JEgean. 
The streets of Hermoupolis are simply abomina- 
ble — interminable steps, torturous and torturing, 
seldom wide enough for even one vehicle, up-hill, 
down-hill all the time, without ever seeming to 
reach anything. I walked along the quay as if I 
were in a dream, or like a belated vizier of 
Haroun-al-Raschid, amid the greatest variety of 
costume, though Turkish trousers and vests pre- 
dominated. The faces of these islanders are 
the most beastly and unredeemed I ever saw. 
Boundless sensuality and filth lay seared on 
them and into them. Turkish cobblers at the 
street corners mending shoes al fresco ; Turkish 
fishermen in little kiosks frying eels and doling 
them out to hungry customers ; Turkish howadji 
sitting cross-legged in their dens, awaiting vic- 
tims ; tobacco-venders in huge turbans smoking 
impassibly ; trousered lads with shrill voices cry- 
ing their fruits and vegetables in your ears as you 
passed ; paunchy fellows in caftans marching by 
the side of asses laden with water-jugs or ham- 
pers of tomatoes ; others crying the virtues of 

i The Greek clergy are not famous for intelligence, and I 
was surprised to find such a nest of beauty in lively, com- 
mercial little Syra, which seemed like a suburb of Birming- 
ham. 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 6$ 

their melons, salami, or oil. The whole quay was 
blocked up by the squatting or perambulating 
peddlers. I was reminded of the marchands and 
rabais (as they are called) of New Orleans. It 
was a shame to make such diminutive donkeys 
bear such mountainous loads. Many of them 
were hardly bigger than Newfoundlands. Shet- 
land ponies would have been Bucephaluses be- 
side some I saw. 

The shops are mean and dark. We did not 
see one that had the least claim to elegance. 
Photograph shops, the delight and pride of 
most European towns, were almost non-existent. 

Countless low cafes (Kacjxfyeveta kolI fXTTLpeppta, as 

they call them) lined and impeded the streets 
with their tables and awnings. I longed to go 
in and see what they were like, but durst not 
from ignorance of the Romaic. I did contrive 
to get a weak limonata fresca at one, though it 
was served with a pewter spoon. We got back 
change which I have not yet deciphered. The 
Levant is a chaos of conflicting currencies. I now 
have in my pocket American, English, French, 
Swiss, Italian, Danish, Austrian, Greek, and Sy- 
rote coins. One's pocket-book is a cabinet of cu- 
riosities. This is practical numismatics ! All of 
these coins except the American and Danish, 
were obtained coming from London here. The 
Greek five drachmae, two drachmae, and one 



64 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

drachma pieces, especially if new, are beautiful. 
They have a real, genuine ring about them, 
though they are, I believe, somewhat depreciated. 
The gold coins I have not yet seen, for they are 
scarce. 

Brigandage is unknown in these islands, except 
the legalized brigandage of camerieri, battelieri, 
and the whole host of hotel and aquatic vermin 
that infest the Levant and empty your pockets. 
Though written and printed prohibitions against 
receiving fees may be staring the cameriere (as 
the steward is called) in the face, with the pen- 
alty of dismissal, if transgressed, attached, he 
will expect a fee, probably remind you of one, at 
least by insolence of manner. This is the great- 
est misery we suffer : what to give these people, 
or whether to give them anything. One is lit- 
erally famished for small change all the time, for 
there is ever a hand held out to receive it. One 
thing I have remarked at Syra — not a single 
beggar ! At least, I have not been addressed by 
one. What curious boat loads are passing us ! 
unknown nationality, but very picturesque, men, 
women, and children, in all imaginable clouts and 
costumes ; market boats, baggage and passenger 
boats, yachts with the Greek pennant and with 
canopies to keep off the sun, others with gay ar- 
morial or national scutcheons painted in the 
stern, where sometimes there is an aphorism 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 65 

such as e^et 6 6e6s. Naked lazzaroni — so I call 
them at least — are diving like porpoises off the 
mole just as we pass, with utter disregard of the 
ladies on board. What easy, emotionless naked- 
ness ! It is as natural to strip off and plunge in 
here as it is to eat. Off we go ! The Lucifer is 
full of Greeks bound for Athens. If it were not 
so early they would all be as lively as crickets. 
As it is, some are plunged in newspapers, others 
are watching the beautiful scenery through dark- 
ened glasses, for the sun is bright. The Lucifer 
is a side-wheeler. A huge commotion just as we 
start : two boatmen, — one shouting Burro, Burro ! 
(butter, butter !) and the other apparently calling 
down imprecations on us for being in such a 
hurry — are rowing frantically after our ship. 
They have been belated, or we are before our 
time, so it appeared at first as if we should not 
take their baskets, evidently destined for our 
larder, on board. What fury of ejaculation on 
both sides ! One of them lost an oar, and I 
thought he would have lost his senses. The sea 
is again like glass. Vessels lie becalmed, or be- 
witched, all along the shore. There is a Calypso 
spell on the water. In what beautiful, symmetric 
curves it parts from us and flows to the side ! 
No clouds, only cloud-like islands, to tell the 
parting line between sea and sky. 

There is *a young Hellene on board reading a 
5 



66 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

newspaper, the 'E^/xe/Hs (Daily News), which 
looks more like a theatre programme than a 
paper. 

Syra is a capital point for excursions. It is 
the seat of the Greek Steamship Company (aT^o- 
ttXouov iratpia), which sends out steamers on voy- 
ages of a fortnight among all the islands belong- 
ing to the Hellenic kingdom. Sailing in these 
tranquil seas is a matter of no difficulty, for they 
are an Hephaestus-net of islands close enough to- 
gether to sail in a goeletta from isle to isle, or 
even to take a huge, heavy-bottomed o-zcac^os and 
row from point to point. If then one is fortu- 
nate enough to miss the regular steamer in this 
enchanting circumnavigation, there is no harm 
done, and impecunious Greeks can always be 
found to do for one what Uhland's ferryman 
did for his sweet-voiced guest : — 

" Nimm nur, Fahrmann, nimm die Miethe, 
Die ich gerne dreifach biete, 
Zween, die mit mir iiberfuhren, 
Waren geistige Naturen." 

Of course it is quite necessary to have a host in 
view, for these islands, hospitable in everything 
else, are inhospitable in hotels. To reckon with- 
out a host, then, in a Greek circular voyage, is 
even more lamentable in Greece than in the old 
proverb. The Greeks, like the Turks, are hospit- 
able — in the islands, whatever they may be on the 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 67 

main-land ; and one is expected to enrich the ser- 
vants, if riot the proprietor, with a small sum on 
departing. These boats generally leave Wednes- 
day at 8 in the morning. There is the blessed 
arrangement on them that one is not obliged to 
eat. Meals are paid for as they are consumed, 
and the passage money is for the voyage alone. 

The vessel as it steams out of the brilliant- 
toned harbor of Hermoupolis in Syra passes a 
light-house which, like everything else in these 
bold and glittering latitudes, is white. The cru- 
cifixion that the eyes undergo in the ./Egean is 
equal to the old Carthaginian torture. The scat- 
tered rock and refuse of disintegrated islands lie 
about in the water, bits just peeping above the 
water-line, picturesquely suggestive of dangers. 
Tenos, Andros, Mykonos, Delos, and Rhenea are 
faint in the distance — fairy isles, like bits of Me- 
leager's verse, sprinkled about on the sea to sug- 
gest what antiquity must have been, pedestals 
for temples or points for a hovering Athene with 
the spear. The glimpse of Syra, or Syros, as the 
cultivated Greeks call it, reveals the singular 
formation of the island, a beehive of busy, rebell- 
ious Greeks, who have done wonders to enliven 
this Dead Sea and make it look again like the 
ancient times. One has ample opportunities on 
such a voyage to physiognomize with Lavater, 01 
to study costume. The fustandla, or petticoat, 



68 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

is not worn by the Greeks of Asia Minor and 
Turkey as it is throughout Hellas ; but instead 
of its graceful white folds one finds the mon- 
strous leg-bag of the islanders, and high, wide, 
slovenly turban, replaced in Grece by a light 
crimson fez like that worn by the Turkish sol- 
diers. 

After a sail of three hours the steamer arrives 
at Paros, cast upon the sea like a ball and 
guarded on each side by a smaller island. The 
tout ensemble of this famous group has been 
compared to the Brocken. Naxos, with its im- 
mense mountain chain, towers to the left, often 
veiled in white clouds. Anti-Paros, or Oliandros, 
is discerned to the right of Paros. Paros on 
nearer approach is seen to throw out many wild 
and rugged promontories, on which the surf roars 
grandly and ascends in airy vapor from the sea. 
The ship threads her intricate way through a 
series of islands and finally reaches the harbor, 
Naussa (from vavs, a ship). There is a tiny, 
dazzling-white town perched on a cliff, and a 
brown Venetian tower rising before it out of the 
water. Turks, Venetians, and Russians have 
fought for the island, and so fearfully did the 
Russians devastate that it has passed into a prov 
erb in the place. No sooner is the steamer in 
sight than she is immediately enveloped in a 
sort of squall of boats, which toss and tumble 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 6Q 

about her in the vain hope of a passenger. The 
steamer, however, turns round and goes over to 
the neighboring island of Naxos, the seat of the 
mediaeval Duchy of Naxos, still containing a 
tower of the ancient dukes. There are two Ionic 
columns standing on a tiny isle just before the 
town, which are supposed to be relics of the tem- 
ple of Bacchus. Naxos, though the largest of the 
Cyclades, has but 12,000 inhabitants, in spite of 
its 8,000 heavy-armed mentioned by Herodotus. 
It was always celebrated for its wine, and it has, 
besides, great poetic interest in its association 
with the legend of Ariadne, daughter of Minos. 
Like Egeria, the forlorn damsel seems to have 
turned into a fountain, for her name is thus per- 
petuated in Naxos. A channel about two miles 
wide separates Naxos and Paros, two islands 
still famous for their wine and marble. Mar- 
mora is one of the towns of Paros, and repro- 
duces in its name a vision of the quarries of 
Marpassa, famous for the heaviest and hardest 
and most translucent of all marbles. The an- 
tique subterranean quarries out of which the 
statuary marble came were reopened in 1844, 
when marble was wanted for the tomb of Na- 
poleon in the Invalides. What an enchanter's 
wand had the great general ! The marble for ar- 
chitectural purposes was obtained from the sur- 
face. Many excavated places were found full of 



JO GREEK VIGNETTES. 

antique terra-cotta lamps left there by the an- 
cients. As is well known, these quarries grad- 
ually fell into neglect, especially when, under 
Augustus, the quarries of Carrara, near Lucca, 
were discovered. An English company, with a 
capital of ^100,000, is now working them. A 
wretched German, who has been quarrying the 
Verde Antique of Tenos, and the Rosso Antico 
of Laconia, has recently proposed to get at the 
marble more expeditiously by blowing up Mount 
Marpassa with dynamite ! Et? KopaKas ! 

Paros is enveloped in a sort of asteroid dust 
of islets, Douvessa, Keros, Macares, Heraclea, 
and Skiuvessa. To the south the horizon is 
haunted by Ios, called Nio by the sailors, and Si- 
kinos. Ios, too, has a lovely legend hung to it, for 
once, says tradition, fared a ship from Smyrna 
to Athens, and the ship held the body of a blind 
old man. It was the body of Homer, who had 
died on the voyage. The mariners put into Ios 
and buried the body, and even to-day at the lit- 
tle cloister Plakolos they show gravestones that 
mark the grave of Homer. I will not ruffle the 
plumes of this graceful legend by telling about 
the Dutch count in Russian regimentals who, in 
1773, visited Ios and found the grave. The in- 
habitants of the island call themselves Ionians 
and are intelligent, simple-hearted people. The 
wonder is where they get their information from, 



GREEK VIGNETTES. J\ 

shut in as they are from year's end to year's end, 
and only once in a fortnight connecting their lit- 
tle wire with the great cable-wires of the world. 
So acute, however, is the intelligence of the 
Greek that even such scanty communication is 
sufficient to make him infinitely the superior of 
all other Orientals. He is the banker, the clerk, 
the bootblack, the newsboy, and the land-owner 
of the East. This vivid intellectuality is of itself 
sufficient to disprove Fallmerayer's theory that 
the Hellenic blood no longer exists, and that 
modern Hellas is a sort of warmed-up Slavism. 
How the Greeks blaze when Fallmerayer's the- 
ory is mentioned — the stupid Bavarian who 
would take their nationality from them ! 

But the marvel of this JEgean Sea, full of mar- 
vels and delightsomeness as it is, is the island of 
Santorino, the mysterious Vesuvius of the Eastern 
Mediterranean. The island is an extinct volcano, 
hoop-shaped, with unfathomable water in the cra- 
ter and gigantic cliffs rimming it in on three sides. 
The story of Santorino (a corruption for Santa 
Irene) goes back to a dim antiquity. The little 
islet Therasia lies at the door of the crater, and 
makes the circle complete. There is a glittering 
white Greek town, Epanomeria, perched on one 
end of the horned semicircle, which becomes 
more and more conspicuous as the ship glides 
into the lake-like expanse. The ship cannot an- 



72 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

chor, for no plummet-line can fathom these fabu- 
lous waters. It is a dazzling scene of variegated 
marble piled story on story like a Venetian pal- 
ace — green, white, brown, blue-black, yellow, as 
the successive eruptions have come and gone 
with their feverous color. The walls of the 
crater are four hundred metres high, dizzy and 
vertical, while the crater itself is twelve kilome- 
tres long and eight broad. Near where the ves- 
sel stops a long meandering tier of houses rises 
on a precipice twelve hundred feet high, and forms 
the ribbon-like capital of the island Thera. A 
thread of a path winds in zigzag from the bottom 
to the top of this island. The eye can discern 
caves made by human hand in the perpendicular 
wall as it rises sheer from the disk of fairy water 
below. This is the greatest of known craters, and 
has been compared to the Vulcanic ring on the 
moon. A group of rounded peak-like islands 
springs out of the centre of the basin, like, the 
pistils of some wondrous flower. They are en- 
tirely uninhabited, and plumes of twining ser- 
pentine smoke wreathe and coil out of the summit 
of the highest of them. An account gathered 
from a recent traveller 1 will perhaps give the 
reader a distincter impression of this marvelous 
child of the Mediterranean. 

Santorino is only about twelve miles north of 
1 Faucher's Streifziige. Lacroix, lies de la Grtce. 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 7$ 

Crete, and is the southernmost of the Cyclades 
or Revolving Islands that to the antique eye per- 
formed a sort of sacred choric dance round the 
island of Delos. It was not originally the ring 
that we see to-day, but a high rounded insular 
table-land, without any depression in the cen- 
tre. The island was repeatedly peopled from 
the neighboring islands, Amorgos (the birthplace 
of Simonides) and Melos, and then as repeatedly 
abandoned from the dread of the ever-recurring 
eruptions. The volcano opened its sublime bat- 
teries far back in the pleiocene period, and con- 
tinued to break out like a sort of perpetual French 
Revolution till it established a reign of terror in 
the Orient Mediterranean. It seems, like Pom- 
peii and Herculaneum, to have been immerged 
in a vast inundation of volcanic ashes, and then 
overlaid by streams of lava. Prehistoric relics of 
men and houses have been found leading back to 
a remote period, and a village of considerable 
extent has been partially unearthed. Articles of 
clay, pebble, obsidian, and pure copper were 
found, and also many evidences of the island's 
having sunk beneath the sea and then risen 
again, with a superincumbent mass of sea-shells 
overlaying these prehistoric relics. 

The French geologist, Fouque, who was sent 
out to visit and study the volcano during the dis- 
plays of 1866 and 1867, carried off most of the 



74 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

relics to Paris. Fouque and Le Normant place 
the date of these prehistoric remains two thousand 
years before Christ. The Phenicians seem to 
have been the first historic people who inhabited 
the island. The Greeks, with their characteris- 
tic art sense, changed the Phenician name to 
Kalliste (most beautiful), and then to Strongule 
(circle). The Phenicians seem to have known 
the island as a ring broken through, with the 
sea in the middle. Then came the Dorians, in the 
pre-Christian Dark Ages (iooo b. a), and called 
the island Thera, after their leader Theras. A 
rock-alphabet, extremely archaic, has been found 
carved in the cliffs of Santorino, said to be older 
even than that found by a Milesian officer on the 
pedestal of the twin colossi of Abu-Simbel in 
Nubia. 

A sleep of two thousand years succeeded the 
nightmare of the first great historic eruption (2000 
B. a), when in the third century before our era 
the Titan began to toss again. Pliny tells us of 
the convulsions of the island 236 b. c, when 
islands dipped up and then under like living creat- 
ures, received a name, then mysteriously disap- 
peared in the seething water. The most dread- 
ful outbreaks were those of 1650, 1707, and 1866, 
when the volcano acted like a colossal syringe, 
and drenched the neighboring isles. The thun- 
dering of the mighty monster continued three 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 75 

months, and its sulphurous breath blasted the 
vegetation as far away as the island of Melos. 
In February, 1866, thousands of red-hot blocks 
of stone were belched out of the sea, and fell 
back into the hissing water, contributing to the 
formation of new hills and islands a hundred 
yards above the surface of the sea. Two islands 
especially were the picturesque fruit of these 
throes, Georgios and Aphroessa (the foam-born), 
Aphrodite-islands born of the foam of the sea. 
This magnificent tableau lasted nearly two years. 

More than sixty sorts of grapes grow on this 
wonder island, and a wine is produced from some 
of them that is peculiarly delectable to the Rus- 
sian taste. The Russians nearly monopolize the 
fiery juice of this diabolic vineyard. It is like 
Lacryma Christi, Teneriffe, or even Madeira wine 
when it is good. The wine is pure and unmixed 
with grape sugar or alcohol, and will keep a hun- 
dred years in a cool place. 

What a singular contrast to all the smiling 
islands around is this grand demonic rock that 
has a fit of delirium tremens every few hundred 
years, and then makes up for it by exquisite 
beauty and fertility ! In the laughter of such seas 
as these, who would suspect the tragic growl 
that lurks under this loveliest of painted water ! 
There is something JEschylsean in its outbreaks 
— a demonic discontent with the placidity and 



J 6 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

poesy of the other Cyclades. The wonder is that 
it did not, like JEtna, leave more enduring traces 
behind in the plastic Greek nature, — ^Etna that 
overshadows so mightily the idylls of Theocritus, 
and makes those hot Sicilian warblings cooler by 
the fantastic shadow of its background. 

Perfect as every bit of rock is in the purple- 
watered Levant, the rest seem commonplace in 
comparison with this lurid cone — a star-like Hy- 
perion that has fallen among the asphodels and 
lilies. It carries to the highest point that inten- 
sity of color which is spread over the East like 
a physical imagination, and is at times almost too 
much for the traveler who has journeyed from a 
grayer climate. 



II. 

At last in Athens ! But what intense disap 
pointment does the first view of this celebrated 
city give rise to ! Incredible dust, parching heat, 
squalor, shabbiness, and general neglect. After 
a delightful sail up the Saronic Gulf, past Cape 
Sunium, ^Egina, and Salamis, which would have 
been more delightful had I not been a little un- 
well, we steamed into the winding harbor of 
Piraeus, and were instantly boarded by a horde 
of ravenous boatmen, eager to take us to land, 
— Sciotes, Syrotes, JEginotes, lonians, and Al- 
banians. I do not know what I should have 
done in the universal scrimmage, had I not fallen 
into the hands (almost into the arms) of the 
Ionian dragoman, Miltiades Vidis, who spoke 
English. While I stood vainly parleying with 
the captain of the Lucifer, who did not under- 
stand French or German, respecting my ticket, 
which had not been restored, — a parleying 
which was as ludicrous as it was distressing, for 
it soon attracted a circle of curious Athenians, — 
the blessed Miltiades fell into the midst of us as 
if from heaven, and at once made the captain un- 



78 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

derstand that I wanted my ticket back, which 
was a return-ticket and was to get me to Brindisi 
on my way to Liverpool. The cameriere had 
neglected, after collecting it in the morning, to 
hand it to me again. Well, Miltiades was worthy 
of his namesake of old, and we came out victori- 
ous from this more than Marathon. I never saw 
such a pertinacious, prickly-tongued set as these 
Piraeote boatmen. They follow you up and down 
the steamer, peep into your face (and perhaps 
into your pocket), interrogate with eyes, tongues, 
and hands, offer to take you ashore, suggest 
hotels, etc., and though you say No, in all im- 
aginable languages and with all imaginable em- 
phasis, they keep hanging about like hornets, and 
insist on giving you the sting of their services. 
A sting it is indeed that long rankles in an empty 
pocket, for there is no settled tariff (as there is 
none for the Athenian a/xa&u, carriages), and you 
are literally at their mercy. Land you must, for 
the ship is out in the harbor and you cannot 
swim ashore with a portmanteau, an umbrella, a 
pair of spectacles, a shawl, an overcoat, and a 
duster, easy as it seems to be to strip off in this 
antique atmosphere and plunge into the sea. It 
was the same at Syra, the morning we left, on the 
arrival of the steamer Mercuriox Candia. Though 
it was but little after 4 in the morning, the ship 
was already surrounded, like a team of steaming 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 79 

horses, with a swarm of gad-fly boats full of 
naked-legged Ionians in waistcoat and fez, who, 
even before the Mercur stopped, boarded her 
like so many corsairs, climbing up the sides and 
gangway, amid the universal scolding and damn- 
ing of the crew. Thrice-blessed (or iravayio^ as 
they say in the Greek church) be the bronze- 
faced Miltiades for rescuing me from these har- 
pies, interpreting for me about my ticket, putting 
me, bag and baggage, in his boat, and conveying 
me, like the precious Argosy he had captured, to 
a ajuaf?) that stood waiting for us on shore. One 
felt as poor Isaac must have felt when the ram 
appeared, or like classic Iphigenia on the trans- 
formation. " Shall we go by carriage or by rail- 
way ? " inquired I, timidly, of the JEgis-like Mil- 
tiades, hoping that he would reply, " By railway," 
for I knew that transportation by rail was only a 
drachma, and my rapidly drained pocket shrank 
from the five miles' drive to the Acropolis in an 
expensive carriage. " By carriage," replied the 
inexorable Miltiades, seeming to read my inner- 
most heart and sternly rebuking any economical 
instinct left lingering there. I yielded, as he had 
been so kind already and would doubtless point 
out to me many objects of interest along the road, 
and he did in fact. The road runs for a while be- 
side the Long Walls of Themistocles, and in sev- 
eral places their foundations and superstructure, 



80 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

to a considerable extent, are laid bare, — a piece 
of admirable masonry, to have resisted leveling 
Lacedaemonians, Venetians, Turks, and, most 
reckless of all, Athenians themselves. Only the 
wall on the right, covered with ages of dust and 
blackened by weather-stains, was visible as we 
drove along. For some time we followed this 
great jugular vein of ancient Athens, a vein con- 
necting it with the vitality, the vigor, and the liv- 
ing energy of the sea. We stopped at a rude inn 
where a fellow in the national costume refreshed 
Miltiades with a glass of something green out of 
a pink decanter. I, meanwhile, sat looking over 
his book of recommendations as a guide, and 
found to my surprise many well-known and dis- 
tinguished names. I say surprise, for though the 
appearance of the dragoman was eminently hon- 
est and kind, I did not judge from his English 
that he had been in such distinguished company. 
I found letters and recommendations from Sydney 
Colvin, Newton of the British Museum, H. Mac- 
lean, Henry T. Stanley, Amelia B. Edwards, 
Oscar Browning, and some English noble folk, 
all carefully folded and pasted in the book, and 
all cordially uniting in commending the care, 
kindness, and polyglot accomplishments of my 
savior. He seemed proud that I recognized so 
many names, said he had been in America three 
years, but (with decided pride) learned his Eng- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 8 I 

lish in London, had served a secretary of lega- 
tion or two, and knew all the classic places by 
heart. He announced to me as we drove along, 
" Yonder dee spot where Admiral Themistoclee 
bore on the Prussian ship," while I sat mute with 
indignation and horror and looked out for the 
imaginary spot. " Yonder dee Hymettus where 
you get honey for your breekfast," whilst I was 
supposed to be licking my lips at this savory 
announcement. " Dere dee Acropolis," point- 
ing to a mass of dirty-looking ruins scowling in 
the distance, and in which I in vain tried to recog- 
nize the dazzling contours of the far-darting Par- 
thenon. Is that the Parthenon ? I could not help 
muttering to myself, over and over again, like 
Keats's ancient beadsman. Am I at Athens ? 
Is this Miltiades Vidis ? In these vague and 
vast inquiries time fled, and presently we found 
ourselves with a mouthful of dust and a library 
of information from our guide before the The- 
seum. How noble and pensive it looked in the 
evening light ! Inconceivably gray and grand it 
stood on its plateau almost intact from a remote 
antiquity. I saw or thought I saw children play- 
ing among the columns — bits of Yesterday be- 
fore this Ancient of Days. 1 Our horses were, 
however, too quick-footed for my eyes to tarry 

1 An annual festival is held in the square in which this 
Temple of Theseus is situated, when the strange and stately 
6 



82 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

long on this famous cynosure, and we were 
whirled on through a labyrinth of excruciating 
streets. Everybody seemed to be in them, too, 
and our coachman uttered strange cries, in a 
boulevard Greek perhaps as old as Homer, for 
the obstructers to get out of the way. Narrow, 
winding, and squalid, these streets wind and 
twine on themselves like bewildered corkscrews, 
until they debouch into the 6805 Alokov or the 
686s "Epjjiov, 1 the two principal thoroughfares of 
the city. For the first time I saw the national 
costume with sufficient frequency to take in its 
details : 2 shoes or slippers of red undressed 
leather, with a tuft of worsted like a pen wiper on 
the pointed and upturned toe ; leggins of white 
cloth fitting close to the legs and clasped at the 
knee by a garter, which is often varied by strips 
of cloth wrapped in contrary directions round the 
calf of the leg ; then a petticoat or kilt of white 
cloth, which may be of various fullnesses, in in- 
numerable folds, reaching hardly to the knee ; 

dances of the modern Greeks — the men dancing with each 
other — may be observed in the open air. 

1 The same name belonged to one of the Athenian streets 
in antiquity, as Jebb, in his Attic Orators, mentions. 

2 The costume is of high antiquity, and, though coming 
originally from the Albanians and adopted as a national 
costume only since the War of Independence in 1821-28, 
has been observed on a coin of Pyrrhus now in the Museum 
at Naples. 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 83 

then a waistcoat, embroidered or not according to 
the taste or means of the wearer, and fitting close 
to the figure. Some have tight white sleeves, 
others large and flowing ones, or false sleeves of 
dark cloth hanging from the shoulder. Many 
have a gay sash round the loins. A red fez, 
with or without a long blue tassel, surmounts and 
completes the costume, which on slender figures 
is very graceful, but on stout or paunchy ones in- 
finitely awkward. To see a great waddling Athe- 
nian, with his kilt starched stiff and standing out 
at right angles with his hips, like a sunflower, 
puffing and laboring through this dust and sun- 
shine, is a scene to excite commiseration. The 
costume is varied in a great many ways. Blue 
stockings to the knee, and a bright blue or many- 
colored waistcoat, with a straw hat instead of a 
fez, may be seen, making a stylish contrast with 
the white Albaniote kilt. There is a resemblance 
between this dress and that of the Scotch High- 
landers. 1 I see women stepping about in a 

1 The king wears the national costume on state occa- 
sions, and it must be confessed there is a great deal of grace 
in it. It gives a peculiar swing and stateliness to the figure. 
One is reminded of the grave walking of antiquity such as 
Plato says was a part of (what he calls) (Tcacppovvvr). To 
see its wearers adjusting themselves at table or sauntering 
slowly and majestically across the square, calls up a vision 
of former life, which, however different in particulars, bears 
a close resemblance to the life of to-day. 



84 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

strange and beautiful costume — the same cos- 
tume nearly as that described by Williams in his 
account of Theresa, Byron's " Maid of Athens." 
The most remarkable part of it is the brilliant 
red cap arranged coquettishly among the hair 
and hanging gracefully on one side with a splen- 
did pendent golden tassel. In several cases this 
was worn in contrast with a black silk dress and 
black lace shawl. Only a parasol shielded the 
head and face from the sun. 1 European costumes 
are very general. How the men can wear the fez 
in this blinding light I cannot see, for it has no 
protection for eyes or ears, and must be hot ; so 
also must be the close-wrapped leggings. What 
they have on under all this I am at a loss to con- 
ceive. The necessity of frequent change of such 
clothing is obvious, — no rain for weeks and 
months, — and whirling dust, as in Northern 
China, nearly all the time. It is as bad as Rome 
in midsummer. 

Just as we entered or rather crossed Eolus 
Street we had a magnificent glimpse of the Acrop- 
olis and its four hundred feet of historic perpen- 
dicular. No position more glorious for a fortress 
or a temple could be imagined — commanding, 
isolated, and towering, like Athens itself in the 

1 The queen and her ladies of honor — scions of the great 
Greek families of Botzaris, Kolokotroni, Mavrocordato, and 
others — occasionally wear it. 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 85 

hubbub of Greek republics. All around purpling 
and crimsoning mountains — the blush of Lyca- 
bettus, the violet of Hymettus, the gleam of the 
sea at Phalerum, and the glamour of Parnes and 
.^Egaleos in the distance. High up loomed this 
immortal eminence, symbol of intellectual and 
aesthetic eminence, and an undying relic of the 
unattainable past. When I got to the hotel, 
bathed, and went out in the twilight among the 
glorious ruins of the Temple of Jupiter Olympius, 
I could not help a feeling of strangeness and awe 
at the surrounding desolation. The noble Corin- 
thian colums of this temple, the hoary and time- 
stained arch of Hadrian, the beautiful ridge of 
flowering Hymettus on the east, and the Parthe- 
non faintly flushed by the setting sun, made truly 
a hive of busy recollections. And then the 
strange Greeks one saw. There was a kilted, 
blue-waistcoated Albanian talking to a Greek 
priest in black gown and steeple-crowned hat ; 
white-buskined peasants driving donkeys and 
armed with revolvers ; Greek soldiers in red 
jackets and blue trousers; Greek school-boys 
fresh from their Xenophon and Thucydides ; 
groups of Athenian ladies among the columns, 
in European panier and chapeau ; many-colored 
strangers from all parts of the East and West, — 
all these standing or walking in striking tableau 
among the ruins on the road. 



86 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

We got up this morning early and took a walk 
after the morning /<a^^e?, which all the Greeks, 
like the French and Italians, seem to favor as a 
preparation for the dejeuner a la fourchette. I 
turned up in the direction of the palace, a great 
barrack-like quadrangle with a rich-colored Pen- 
telic portico, marble plinths and window-frames, 
and spacious balcony in front. The glare from it 
in this atmosphere is almost intolerable. It is 
an anomaly in government that King George 
lives in a rented palace : singularly suggestive, 
too, of the slightness of the kingly tenure. The 
palace is the property of the late King Otho's 
heirs. In front there is a wide space unin- 
closed, and interrupted here and there by a mag- 
nificent group of aloes, oleanders, and myrtle. 
The palace looks in a straight line down Hermes 
(or Ermes, if we mean to follow the modern 
Greek contempt for aspirates) Street, over the 
beautiful tropical garden of the Constitution 
Square. In the centre of this square, which is a 
perfect thicket of myrtle, orange, aloe, cactus, 
cypress, and pepper trees, there is a fountain 
playing, and beyond lies the street, interrupted 
by a very curious and very ancient Byzantine 
church. 

This church is to the modern specimens of that 
style of architecture what the miniatures of Hans 
Memling are to the large canvases of the Ve- 



GREEK VIGNETTES, 87 

netians. We strolled along by the palace and 
turned down a spacious avenue by the Hotel de 
la Grande Bretagne. It is a gross slander to say 
that new Athens is like a modern German city; 
this street, particularly, is more like some of the 
beautiful avenues that radiate from the Arc de 
Triomphe at Paris, of course on a small and as 
yet quite incomplete scale. Did any dingy Ger- 
man city— even Munich, the best of them — ever 
have anything like some of these exquisite mar- 
ble fronts, with their Corinthian and Ionic colon- 
nades, their niched statuary, their balustrade-like 
cornice surmounted by grouped and classic urns ? 
None that I have seen. They are part and par- 
cel of this climate, where the marble floor of the 
Parthenon, after the pacing of myriads of feet, 
the assaults of various armies, the rains of more 
than two thousand summers and winters, and the 
rubbish accumulated since the time of Pericles, is 
nearly as white to-day as in the year of its build- 
ing. It is true there are many houses here which, 
being built of broken limestone and faced with 
stucco, do resemble houses in Teutonic Europe. 
But it is wrong to say that the Athenian city is in 
the least German. Several German architects of 
eminence have for years been at work in laying 
out and building the handsomer portions of 
Athens ; but they have failed to impress on their 
work the usually so distinct Germanic individual- 



88 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

ity. Many of the houses I passed were very 
beautifully built. The marble was polished and 
of a mellow cream color • the windows without 
shutters and shaded by the movable Venetian 
blinds toned to suit the house ; gardens full of 
delicious scents extended on the sides, and here 
and there within the grounds some small poly- 
chromatic building relieved the intense bright- 
ness of the polished surfaces. I walked down by 
the royal garden behind the palace, a garden 
designed by the former Queen Amalie, 1 after 
whom the street running down the front of the 
palace is named (68os 'A/xaAias). It is some- 
what disappointing to see a royal garden sur- 
rounded by a rather dilapidated wooden fence 
painted a dingy olive green ; but as soon as you 
look beyond the fence, the eye and the senses 
are delighted with the aromatic wilderness spread 
out before them. It all seemed so familiar to 
me : the yellow exquisite-scented acacia, the pink- 
blossomed mimosa trembling in golden sunlight, 
the graceful china-trees with their bunches of 
ripe berries, the dusty fig and silvery olive, the 
orange and white-flowered palmetto, the laura- 
mundi, the fleche-like cypresses, the throng of 
embattled century-plants that recalled an episode 

i The well-known lady of whom About said that while 
the king examined all state papers without signing them, 
she signed them all without examining them. 



GREEK VIGNETTES, 89 

in the early life of Heine and crowded impene- 
trably on one side of the garden fence. I had 
seen them all, and more than these, in my own 
southern home. But where was the grass ? Not 
a sprig of it apparently on the thirsty soil, all 
burnt up by the touch of the sirocco. Still the 
garden is delightfully dense, and royal courtesy 
opens it several hours every day to the public. 
Why cannot all this wonderful plain be planted 
in the same manner ? Light as the soil is, there 
are ineradicable figs and olives, cypresses and 
lentisc, growing now where they grew in the time 
of Plato. And there are long cypress-bordered 
avenues shooting out in various directions where 
the trees seem most vigorous. There is even a 
luxuriant forest between the Piraeus and Athens. 
Many streets are shaded by long lines of feathery 
pepper-trees, which have been naturalized in 
Greece and are highly graceful in their light and 
tremulous foliage. 

I walked on down through the glare and dust 
of the street, seeking shade wherever I could find 
it, and stopping now and then to notice numerous 
large houses in process of erection in various di- 
rections. The striking cone of Lycabettus, where 
there is the reservoir which supplies Athens with 
water, 1 was before me all the time, and the range 

1 See Faucher's Streifziige for a curious account of the 
ceremonies with which this and other waters are annually 



90 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

of Hymettus, looking almost near enough to touch. 
There is no distance in such an atmosphere. I 
passed several beer-gardens full of plants and 
flowers, one called rj \zvky) Trepto-Teprj, with a white 
dove painted over the portal and inside a tangle 
of perfumes and blossoms. The oleander is more 
beautiful here than I have ever seen it, except in 
Louisiana. The air is laden with it as you pass, 
and it seems to delight in drought and sunlight. 
After a while I turned back and walked along be- 
hind the palace garden, every now and then catch- 
ing glimpses of a marble capital or a piece of cor- 
nice lying in among the trees, probably found 
there when the garden was laid out, many years 
ago. The song of the cicada came to me over 
the fence, full of the sweetest associations. In 
our own sunny South I had learned to love it in 
my earliest childhood, and to listen for it on brill- 
iantly sunny days. We children used to catch 
the cicadae and make them sing for us by a little 
cruelty. A gentle squeeze would make them 
break out into shrill song. And then, what was 
our delight if we found the shell of one that had 
been shed and left sticking to some huge old 
black-jack! Added to such pleasant recollections 
were those drawn from Greek poetry, the lines of 
Anacreon, the lovely epigrams of the anthology, 

blessed by the church, that they may not dry up and leave 
the town waterless. 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 91 

the tender sentiment attached to such ephemeral 
existences by the Melic poets, the dream of beauty, 
gayety, and evanescence which they symbolized 
to the laughing Athenians. They, like the imper- 
ishable olive groves of Academe, cannot be burnt 
out by any blaze or broil of the sun ; rather they 
are the children of the sun, and find in him their 
germinant principle. In a short while my walk 
brought me in sight of the noble group of Jupiter 
Olympius, a group of grand pillars still surmounted 
by their architrave, standing on a gentle eminence 
and looking straight, from one of the facades, 
on the deep blue bay of Phalerum. A white sail 
could be seen now and then, and a wavy mountain 
line like the ripple of a nereid's blue hair. Noth- 
ing could be more poetic than the situation of 
these majestic relics of antiquity, or more picture- 
like than the landscape which they frame ; no 
matter which way you look, an unrivaled perspec- 
tive of the Acropolis, with the noble Panathenaic 
frieze, and the Parthenon, or what is left of it, 
peeping over the wall ; then the Saronic Gulf, blue 
as the flames of alcohol or sulphur, the Pentelic 
range, the distant sapphire of Peloponnesian 
peaks, and even the cathedral-like Acrocorinthus. 
A Greek church or two lay in the foreground, 
with graceful oriental campanile opening here 
and there into arches upheld by Ionic pillars and 
holding a huge bell, like a brazen lily, in their 



92 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

heart. The three hundred churches which Athens 
is said to have had in the time of Justinian have 
dwindled into twenty or thirty. 

Yesterday evening after our 5 o'clock dinner I 
sallied forth, glass and guide-book in hand, to see 
the sunset from the Parthenon. As usual I in- 
stinctively took the longest way. Turning up the 
bright new street beside the hotel, I diverged to 
the right after a while and found myself in the 
usual labyrinth of alleys that skirt the environs of 
Turkish Athens everywhere, a labyrinth full of 
low drinking shops, cafes, and inns, some with 
arched doorways like pictures of the place of 
the Nativity, opening on large, dingy, stable-like 
rooms with a few rude tables and chairs scattered 
about. Most of the houses were low, of one or 
two stories, with an occasional tree or trellised 
vine, or pot of basil. They were rough stuccoed 
affairs, many of them like pictures of the lacus- 
trine hovels, abounding in children, cats, sol- 
diers, red-fezzed men, and bare-headed women. 
For a time I was quite bewildered in this pecul- 
iarly Turkish and Albaniote precinct of Athens, 
where little Greek is spoken, but I gradually 
emerged on the Pelasgic slope of the Acropolis 
and picked my way over the debris in front of 
the Dionysiac Theatre. 

In strange contrast with the surrounding si- 
lence and squalor were the groups of dirty Greek 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 93 

children playing about among the ruins, and the 
solitary peasants who seemed to be hanging 
around in the approaching twilight with anything 
but benevolent intent. I soon learned, however, 
that Athens is perfectly safe. I wandered on 
and soon got among the wilderness of unrecog- 
nized ruins and localities adjacent to the Dionys- 
iac Theatre. The ground was covered by a nu- 
merous populace of broken statues, metopes, 
pieces of architraves, relics of gracefully carved 
capitals, tombs, steles, and fluted pillars. Many 
were covered with inscriptions interrupted at all 
points by sudden and disastrous fractures — inar- 
ticulate cries in marble. The whole was like 
what one imagines a graveyard to be at the Res- 
urrection — a hopeless jumble of conflicting and 
incoherent individualities. There was a kilted 
peasant near, drawing water out of a well and 
washing his face from the bucket. The ground 
was full of excavations, drains, basements of un- 
known buildings, w r alls running in various lines, 
then, as if themselves struck with a paroxysm of 
doubt, stopping short and ending in nothing. A 
huge archway of a vaulted subterranean passage 
opened suddenly as if revealed by an earthquake. 
Wells were sunk here and there. Mountains of 
rubbish lay about which not even German schol- 
arship has yet sifted. Then I came to the site 
of Curtius's excavations in 1862, — the deep sem- 



94 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

icircle of the Odeum of Herod, with bewitching 
glimpses of Salamis, iEgina, and the mountains 
through the ruined windows. Could there be a 
more perfect framework for such a scene than a 
ruined window with waving grasses hanging from 
it, and the blue laughter of the sea scintillating 
up ? Not far off was the great theatre where 
the plays of ^Eschylus and Sophocles, Euripides, 
Aristophanes, and Menander were performed, 
not in the life-time of the four former, but with 
splendor after their death. The amphitheatre of 
seats hewn out of the solid rock is uncomfortably 
vertical. Spectators in the upper tiers, like spec- 
tators at Drury Lane and Covent Garden in the 
amphitheatre, must have looked down on the 
heads of the chorus and officiating priests. The 
orchestra, near which were the best seats during a 
representation, struck me as small. Here, indeed, 
on the slope of the southeastern Acropolis, might 
Symonds have written his brilliant chapter on 
Aristophanes, and have conceived the varied 
movement and multiplicity of the sacred Dionys- 
iac festival. But I cannot, like him, conceive 
the sacred obscenity of that scene, the religious 
licentiousness of its observance, the fleshly epiph- 
any and apotheosis of the strange pagan celebra- 
tion, — ■ the long line of waving Bacchanals, the 
ivy-wreathed boys and Silenus-faced priests. And 
all this passed away ! Owls and prickly pear have 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 95 

replaced the wisdom and wit of Aristophanes. 
Aloes send up their far-darting spires where the 
shaft of sarcasm flew from tier to tier. Broken 
stones are the mournful remnant of the elegant 
symmetry of the Odeum. Rooks caw over the 
Parthenon and haunt this desolation in the twi- 
light. The immemorial violet and crocus and 
narcissus, that blend with honey in scattering their 
scent over the field of Attic poetry, flourish in 
the spring-time in the crevices of the surround- 
ing rock. Wild oats wave from the inaccessible 
walls of the mighty citadel of violet - crowned 
Athens. There is no longer the apparition of the 
chryselephantine work of Phidias lifting its helmed 
head over the Propylaea, and making its spear- 
point glitter like a star over the turbulent city. 

Before turning in the rude wooden gate that 
admits visitors to the summit, one comes on a 
scene of almost savage ruin and bereavement. 
Perhaps not even the Palace of the Caesars is a 
scene of more intricate architectural problems 
and identifications than this vestibule to the most 
glorious of earthly temples. For a time (being 
without a guide and wandering at will) I was in 
doubt how to gain the entrance, which stood con- 
siderably above us. Finally, after eluding the 
clutches of an old trinket and rosary vender who 
had a basket of jugs and jars for sale, I climbed 
up and knocked with the handle of my umbrella. 



96 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

At length I succeeded in attracting the attention 
of a little dog that barked shrilly and came run- 
ning to meet me. We soon made friends with the 
bright-eyed, laughing-faced fellow, and presently 
one of the old revolutionists of '26-27 came hob- 
bling to meet us. He seemed pleased at the sud- 
den intimacy between his dog and the visitors, 
and admitted us without hesitation. I was sur- 
prised and delighted to find that he made no 
movement to accompany us, — a movement which 
was found very necessary when, a few years ago, 
a thief secreted himself among the ruins and 
tried to sever w T ith his penknife the marble toe of 
the Nike Apteros, — and we soon found ourselves 
alone within the inclosure of the Parthenon, the 
richest mosaic of immortal memories that our 
world contains. It was just sunset. The air was 
cooled from the blue fire of the afternoon, and a 
gentle wind rustled among the columned temples 
and gateway, making a soft music for the genius 
of the place. Everywhere the same mouldering 
debris, overrun by brambles or wild cucumber 
vines, — cucumbers, the staple fare of the Athe- 
nian proletariat of Alciphron's time, and which 
pursue the fleeing traveler in all imaginable 
states of composition and decomposition, down 
to the hotel-fares of modern times ! 

Prostrate columns and the aesthetic chaos of 
an overthrown and abandoned worship ran riot 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 97 

in every nook and corner. Huge Doric columns 
towered upward with massive architrave, or lay 
with their drums scattered on the ground, with 
the mark of the iron visible where they were 
joined together. The battle-field of scholars, the- 
ologians, and antiquaries lay all about. One can- 
not conceive how so much could have been 
crowded into so little space. Eleven hundred by 
five hundred feet are the proportions of the plateau 
of the Acropolis, if its perverse ups and downs 
can be called a plateau. The solid base rock is 
visible nearly everywhere except in the Parthe- 
non itself. One is lost in the multitude of col- 
umns, chambers, and steps. This must, under 
Pericles, have been the richest cluster of build- 
ings the eye ever dwelt on — dense as a bouquet 
of flowers. It was the blossom and burden of 
Attica — this carven, chromatic hill, full as any 
cornucopia with the products of Athenian skill. 
One can imagine the Athenians content with 
their squalid houses when their eyes turned to 
this splendid crag and they saw there the glory 
of Athenian supremacy. It is no matter of mar- 
vel that all other languages were jargon to them, 
and all other nations jargon-talkers (BdpfiapoL). 
No one has ever solved the riddle of this supe- 
riority of the Greeks. Think of their magnificent 
drama amid the surrounding barbaric silence. It 
is like the silver peak of the Jungfrau among the 
7 



98 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

mole-hills of the Hottentot. And then consider 
the isolation of their culture, its unique devel- 
opment, its many-sided and iridescent grace. Of 
course there is much of the same intellectual 
spirit among the distant Hindoos and Chinese, 
but there is an element of the grotesque com- 
bined with it that gives to all that these nations 
have said and done a something out of time, the 
tone of a cracked bell. The figure of Silenus was 
as near as the Greeks could get to anything that 
was monstrous in art. And in Silenus the union 
of the beast and the man was relieved by the 
most human laughter. Sometimes, as in VergiPs 
Eclogue, he was even exalted into a poetic and 
philosophic mentor. The streak of diabolism 
running through Japanese art finds no response 
in the Greek. Winckelmann's serenity, Lessing's 
beauty, are found there in abundance, but beyond 
the harmless satyrs and the masques of Medusa, 
nothing that is purely and fantastically horrible. 
How pure, how fragrant are these sculptured 
shafts surmounted by their volutes or their acan- 
thus leaves ! how different from the ever-archaic 
Egyptian, the Indian temple, or the pagoda of 
China ! 

I wandered among the pillars of the Parthenon 
and studied out the peristyle, pronaos, opistho- 
domos, and cella, as well as the present condi- 
tion of the temple allows. Can it be true, as Dr 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 99 

Mahaffy in his recent " Rambles " affirms, that 
people are allowed to shoot at the remnants of 
the wonderful Panathenaic frieze ? Or has the 
good doctor in this as in some other things " ram- 
bled " indeed ? It is inconceivable that the Greek 
government could be so impotent as to allow 
even the possibility of such vandalism. And yet 
Bayard Taylor, I think, tells us that the monu- 
ment of Botzaris at Mesolonghi and Ottfried 
Miiller's monument at Athens have been similarly 
maltreated. And the Greeks are, as Dr. Mahaffy 
says, sufficiently careless of their national monu- 
ments. I was allowed to walk the whole time 
alone, while the ground was covered with valuable 
fragments of sculpture — many small inscribed 
pieces that any one might take away. Several of 
the pillars looked to me on the point of tottering 
over, which a little bracing would secure for cent- 
uries. The lame and futile attempts made by 
King Otho to reelevate some of the prostrate pil- 
lars stand to-day as a monument of capriciously 
abandoned purpose. Tuckerman enters into an 
interesting calculation about the cost of reelect- 
ing the columns of the Olympieum, and tells us 
that those which are fallen could be raised for 
$3,000 each. The columns, floors, and stylobates 
are written over with the innumerable autograph 
of fools, who have left behind this sole record of 
their folly. Everything is chipped or incised with 



100 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

felonious penknives as high up as arms can reach. 
Lead-pencil marks are tolerably harmless, for the 
rain will soon wash them away, but when it comes 
to positively sculpturing Smith and Jones in the 
floors and on the pillars, — names some of which 
date back to the early decades of the century, 
— it almost seems as if an efficient guardian 
should accompany visitors, annoying as such 
guardians generally are. The Greek government 
cannot fret with foreign governments for not de- 
livering up their precious fragments, as Dr. Ma- 
haffy well remarks, when the monuments they 
have in their possession are thus bit by bit pass- 
ing away. Ages of quarrying and stealing failed 
to make much impression on the Colosseum till 
the English tourist with his penknife and pencil 
arrived on the spot. In this way the Parthenon 
is being chipped to pieces by inches. The innu- 
merable idiots that visit it have unwittingly pil- 
loried their own names for the execration of suc- 
ceeding ages. I noticed the same autograph 
mania on top of the Cathedral of Milan. The 
delicate pilasters and sculptures that make a mar- 
ble museum of its roof were, wherever it was pos- 
sible, scribbled over by the pack that ostensibly 
go up to see the view, but really it seems to leave 
behind their wretched names. Jones, Smith, and 
Robinson on the Acropolis indeed ! Could not 
a Bridge of Sighs, or a series of Pozzi, be con- 
structed for these people ? 



GREEK VIGNETTES. IOI 

— I was interrupted in my account of the 
Acropolis by the sound of the dinner-bell, or 
rather of the preparation-bell, which in this hotel 
rings like a fire-bell and is equal to an American 
gong. I went down to find our usual table d'hote 
set : an Englishman talking French, a Russian 
officer, two other Britishers just returned from a 
trip through Syria and Constantinople, and five 
or six Greeks talking alternately in their own lan- 
guage and in French. French is very generally 
understood in Athens, and is the language of so- 
ciety, or of an entertainment where foreigners 
might be present. There are many points of re- 
semblance between the Greeks and the French. 
Their eating and drinking habits and hours are 
the same, and there is the same intellectual quick- 
ness and restlessness, not to speak of the simi- 
larity of complexion and appearance. The fond- 
ness of the Greeks for France is seen in the 
publication of several French newspapers at 
Athens. To be sure, the French always has a 
very decided accent, but then it is at least intel- 
ligible, which is more than the modern Athenian 
can say for his attempts at other languages. 
Some of these Greeks are regular habitues of the 
hotel, and have their silver napkin rings and 
wine-marks ; others are transient boarders, rest- 
ing a few days at Athens on the way to other 
places, among whom are the two Syrian English- 



102 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

men. I cannot say that I exactly like Greek 
fare. The cooks spoil everything with their oil, 
the associations of which are not enhanced when 
one recollects that great quantities of it are ex- 
ported to — grease the machinery of Manchester. 
The red mullet which we had for dinner would 
have been excellent had they not been literally 
smothered in it. After this there were toothsome 
culottes de veau, with tomato sauce ; then a very 
curious dish of squashes a la Grecque, dressed 
with cheese, maccaroni, and hashed meat, and 
made into a sort of baked pudding ; last of all 
the usual China bowl, accompanied by a mixed 
salad of cucumbers, beets, and lettuce, all 
drowned in oil. Oil is in the air and in the 
cuisine here everywhere. The dinner was com- 
pleted with a most delicious fruit meringue of 
apricots, succeeded by peaches and pears. In 
the adjoining Cabinet de Lecture a small cup of 
very black Turkish coffee is served regularly 
after every meal — a thick decoction, very sweet 
and black, with a chocolate-like scum on top and 
a decided layer of sediment at the bottom. It 
is served without spoons, for what reason I am 
at a loss to divine, except that to stir it would 
be to make it insufferably sweet. At breakfast 
the same morning the waiter first served me with 
a huge plateful of maccaroni, dressed with toma- 
toes and cheese; then three little chops, with 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 103 

potatoes ; then cold fowl, cheese, and apricots. 
We have but one lady, a Russian, who sits op- 
posite and is anything but handsome. She is 
a blonde, — rare at Athens, I should think, — 
with a mountainous coiffure of light hair and ap- 
parently a decided predilection for the French 
language, which she speaks across the table with 
the Russian officer, and on her own side with 
the Englishman — an extremely intelligent fel- 
low, by the way, who seems to have been every- 
where, even in America • I imagine he is a news- 
paper correspondent. He converses with re- 
markable fluency and point. 

The tranquillity of the Hotel des E is 

undisturbed save by an occasional arrival. Stran- 
gers are scarce at Athens at this season. Hence 
everybody that comes is received with open 
arms and frank delight by mine host — -a very 
handsome Greek, whom I have heard talking 
five different languages. The price is ten 
drachmas (francs) a day en pension and twelve for 
the general public. 

My room is cool and pleasant. From the bal- 
cony in front there is perhaps the most magnifi- 
cent view of the Acropolis in Athens. I have 
its noble and majestic profile in all possible 
lights : the dewy transparency of early morning, 
the shekina-like glory of noon, the unutterable 
beauty of the evening, and the last look at it 



104 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

under the thick crowding stars. After a while I 
shall have the full moon to complete this chapter 
of photo-landscapes. 

One's only trouble (beyond the peregrinations 
of insects at night) is the frequency and emphasis 
of the cries in the streets below. These cries 
must begin at least at four in the morning, and 
continue more or less all day — fellows driving 
asses or carrying baskets and crying their wares 
to the quarter in which we live. I make vain 
efforts to decipher these vocal hieroglyphics, but 
so different is the people's language from the 
cultivated or the written Greek that I can make 
out only an occasional word — crt)/<a, etc. I fre- 
quently hear Kvpwi, $v\o ! (Wood, Messieurs !) It 
is a question of great interest whether the efforts 
of the cultivated modern Greeks to lead back 
their language to its original purity will succeed. 
I myself cannot but believe with Wagner that 
such efforts are reactionary, retrogressive, and 
contrary to the process of linguistic growth. The 
language of the newspapers is no doubt very dif- 
ferent from the language of the markets, the 
streets, the cafes, and the theatre. It is, I think, 
almost impossible at this late date to arrest the 
analytic tendency of modern Greek — a tendency 
universal in language and which bears immedi- 
ately on the rejection or expulsion of inversions, 
synthetic verbal and declensional forms, gram- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 05 

matical gender, and the whole paraphernalia of 
antique inflected speech. Already the accusative 
is almost universally used by the modern Greek, 
as it is by all the Romance languages, as the case 
fitted above all others for general use. Why the 
accusative should have been selected, except on 
the principle of its frequent use, is a question. 
There is the same tendency in English in the 
perverse substitution of the dative them for the 
earlier Anglo-Saxon accusative, and in the use of 
him, me, thee, etc., after than and the substantive 
verb. The same tendency to use the accusative 
or dative is traceable in Danish, in colloquial 
Italian, and in other languages. I can seldom 
catch an inflection in the talk to which I listen 
at cafes, perhaps because my ear is not yet suffi- 
ciently cultivated to detect these niceties. The 
aspirates x an d are heard with disagreeable 
emphasis and frequency. Otherwise there is no 
aspiration. One is inclined to think, with the 
author of " Modern Greek in its Relation to 
Ancient," 1 that there could have been no aspira- 
tion in antiquity, or at least very little of it. If 
it had been strong, how could it have fallen away 
so perfectly ? The written sign survives, just as 
the written h in Italian, but no sound is heard. 
Or may there not have been, as has been the 
case with our English h, two streams of usage 
1 Gel dart. 



106 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

and tradition, one studiously cultivated by the 
literate, the other unconsciously adopted by the 
illiterate — one set giving the rough breathing, 
the other and larger set ignoring it ? A glance 
into early English literature is sufficient to show 
a similar state of things with regard to our h. 
Seldom neglected in the Anglo-Saxon (as having 
back of it acute recollections of the Germanic 
guttural) we find its use fluctuating and unsettled 
all through the great popular poems of Semi- 
Saxon, Early English, and Middle English An- 
tiquity. Typical instances enough might be col- 
lected to prove this point if it were necessary, — 
instances gathered from Robert of Brunne's 
Chronicle, the Ancren Riwle, Robert of Glouces- 
ter, Piers Plowman, Chaucer, and the Elizabethan 
poets. It seems at least very singular that if 
aspiration were the rule it should have fallen 
away so universally. Little can be ascribed to 
Turkish influence ; indeed, the Turks would prob- 
ably have assisted in preserving this characteris- 
tic accompaniment of Hellenic pronunciation. 

Small as modern Athens is, there is a curious 
sort of comfort in knowing that it is after all 
about half as large as the ancient city, /. ^., the 
city proper, excluding the outlying demes and 
ports. 

Nothing brings out more vividly the transcend- 
ent cleverness of the Athenians than this small- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. IOJ 

ness of their noble city. A handful of architects 
and poets have dictated to the world and exer- 
cised a thralldom which the world will never throw 
off. It is a despotism, too, of the purest intellect, 
the keenest intelligence, the most piercing and 
brilliant insight. We see it in the agile move- 
ments of the fleet at Salamis, on the field at Mar- 
athon, in the deference of Roman conquerors 
on innumerable historic occasions, even at the 
present day in the acute business qualities of the 
ordinary Greek commis. These characteristics 
have remained as indelible as the tracks of their 
triumphal chariots up the slope of the Propylaea. 
Nearly all the business of the East is said to be 
in their hands, not to say in their pockets. Their 
churches and monasteries crown every height and 
have the amplest domains. Even the newsboys 
of Athens are as lively as wildfire, and run about 
all day long cracking jokes and selling the news. 
Are they like the Celts, selling more newspapers 
and reading less than any other race ? They 
have as many faces as their Temple of the Winds, 
but I must do them the justice to say that I have 
not yet (not yet, I say) been tricked. We are 
dying to find out what they eat and drink, eat 
and drink among themselves, I mean, and not as 
shown on the bill of fare of the dinner-table. 
How I should like to see a grand old Athenian 
menu from a cook that talked Doric ! Doric was 



108 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

their favorite language, and no doubt their recipes 
were as archaic. I shall call in the services of 
Miltiades, whom I see hovering about our vesti- 
bule, and ask him to give me a list of the boissons 
populaires that I may taste each and all. At the 
hotel I am going through the list of vins du pays, 
white and red Parnes, white and red Santorino, 
Samian, and Corinthian wines. The resinated 
wine I have not yet tasted. There is no taint of 
resin in the Parnes rouge which was ordered at 
breakfast this morning and which is labeled in 
French (!) " Cotes de Parnes." All the popular 
drinks that contain wine are said to be strongly 
resinated, a circumstance which Pliny says gave 
wholesomeness to the wine. Taylor and other 
travelers in Greece unite in saying that a taste 
is very soon acquired for this wine, and it is after 
a while greatly relished. I once knew a mechanic 
whose universal remedy — no matter what the 
disease — was turpentine. He even told me it 
was good for new-born infants. So the Greeks, 
those enfant s eternels, may have thought. Noth- 
ing could be more aromatic than the spiced and 
shadow-spangled glades of a pine forest, but the 
exudations from the bark of the pine would, I 
should think, anything but improve the ethereal 
flavors of the grape. However, I mean to try 
for myself. Intrat Miltiades ! Alas ! alas ! Mil- 
tiades told us yesterday that Dr. Schliemann's 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 109 

treasures had been locked up. They had just as 
well be back in Agamemnon's Tomb or at the 
bottom of the sea. He gave me some account 
which I could not quite make out, that they had 
been only temporarily put away until they could 
be displayed in some larger building than the 
Bank, or National Trapeze (!), as the modern 
Greeks call it, — aptly enough named from some 
of its performances, — - where they have been 
hitherto lying. Here then is a pretty pickle, — 
coming four or five thousand miles to find what 
one came to see locked up ! The Greek govern- 
ment should surely remember that there are many 
foreign students here whose chief purpose is to 
see these treasures. We happen to know of four 
prominent American scholars who came expressly 
to see them. And here they are "interned/' as 
they said in the Franco-German war. Nobody 
is, I suppose, going to steal them ; why, therefore, 
should they be immured in the vaults of the 
bank ? The Greeks, however, know themselves, 
if they do not know foreigners. 

Yesterday evening after dinner we went down 
by the train to Phalerum and attended the open 
air theatre there. How curious it seemed to 

me. 'AOrjvaL cts <&a\rjpov, $>a\rjpov eh 'A^r/j/as ; SO 

read my return ticket, with A tfeais (first class) 
added. The road was built by an English com- 
pany, is about four miles long, and rides smoothly 



110 GREEK VIGNETTES, 

and agreeably. This is the great promenade of 
Athens : take a ticket for Phalerum, stroll up 
and down the lovely beach, and then sit for an 
hour or two under the stars listening to Greek or 
Italian music. Modern Greek music is singu- 
larly nasal and monotone. There is something 
wild and wailing in it. I have heard vocalization 
and choral chants of great beauty in the Russian 
church, but the music of a Greek Easter, for ex- 
ample, is like a seasick Gregorian chant. It is 
all light and sound and lamb-eating at Easter-tide 
in Greece. Hettner tells how the rustic popula- 
tion come trooping to town with dressed lambs 
slung in classic fashion across their backs ; of 
the solemn rites in the churches ; the procession 
through the streets with lighted candles; the in- 
tense and silent expectation up to twelve o'clock 
the night before Easter, when the metropolitan 
suddenly appears in the cathedral and cries Xpur- 
rbs avco-rr] ! (Christ is risen !) and then the uni- 
versal outbreak of tumult, fire-arms, and rockets. 
— The beau-monde was out in force at Phalerum 
this evening. I was glad to find the seats num- 
bered, enabling one to get up and go out in the 
intermezzos. The play was a little Italian oper- 
ette (2a7r</>a>), and the music was really charm- 
ing. I cannot say much for Sappho's beauty, a 
tall, dark-haired Italian, head and shoulders above 
Phaon, Phaon had a pleasant tenor voice, but 



GREEK VIGNETTES. \\\ 

sang and acted with affectation. There was a 
graceful ballet, at which the Athenians for some 
inscrutable reason hissed, for there were no legs 
and no indecency. Of course the dresses were 
wonderfully scant, and there was an exhibition of 
feminine gymnastics, as in all ballets, but I can- 
not believe the nation of Lais and Phryne so 
prudish as to object to legs, especially when the 
national costume seems so particularly to ignore 
them. Possibly there may have been something 
objectionable in the characters of the dancers. 
At any rate there was vehement applause as well 
as vehement hissing. The sensitiveness of Athe- 
nian audiences, though not so extreme as that of 
the Neapolitan, is evidenced by various anecdotes 
which have come down to us from the time of 
Euripides. The actors were sometimes stoned 
off the boards. Lucian, says Jebb, describes an 
impersonation of Ajax so vivid that the " whole 
house went mad along with Ajax — they danced, 
shouted, tore off their clothes." The music and 
the mise-en-schie this special evening were singu- 
larly appropriate. Hardly a flutter of breeze, 
cloudless tranquillity above, the gentle ripple of 
the ^Egean on the shore, the rich mountain out- 
lines gradually withdrawing themselves in purple 
obscurity, the gleam of multitudinous stars, the 
fragrance of the salt sea and scented gardens, all 
blending with the classic subject and the delight- 



112 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

ful music to make an almost antique picture. 
The programme or libretto was in Greek inter- 
spersed with Italian songs. There was no rich- 
ness in the costumes or special virtuosity in the 
orchestra ; and yet the whole dwells in my mem- 
ory as a scene to be remembered. All the time 
I felt the curious anachronism of such a subject 
melodized and embalmed in the luxurious strains 
of Italian art. The simplicity and monotony of 
the ancient Greek music seem to have been 
great : five or six notes and the old Pythagorean 
octave. In spite of the intricacy of some of their 
melodies there was hardly an approach to orches- 
tral harmony among the ancient Greeks. It was 
left for the morbid susceptibilities of our time to 
find their vent in a splendid and highly developed 
scheme of musical expression. Beethoven and 
Shakspere are what we have to pit against Homer 
and the Lydian flutes.^ It is the difference be- 
tween the Parthenon and the Cathedral of Co- 
logne. 

I made the mistake of getting two tickets in- 
stead of one, not being sufficiently acquainted 
with colloquial Greek to rectify the error after I 
had discovered it. The incessant talking and 
humming of people all around me prevented a full 
enjoyment of my first musical evening in Greece. 

Phalerum Bay is peculiarly beautiful. An 
English iron-clad was lying at anchor in the 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 113 

offing, and several of her tars with their wide- 
awake, upturned straw hats assisted at the play. 
There are delightful baths, to which the languid 
Athenians continually resort. Fifty lepta for a 
bath, one drachma for the theatre, and one for the 
return ticket, make up an evening's amusement 
that is extremely cheap and popular. The water 
is shallow. There are several pretty villas on the 
shore, and the usual series of Zei/oSox^a, do-napta 
and Brasseries along it. A gay multitude sat in 
front of them, enjoying the balmy air, the view, 
the invariable cigarette, and the tiny cup of coffee, 
preparatory to the play. An evening at Pha- 
lerum is almost the only summer amusement the 
Athenians have. One would think these beauti- 
ful mountains, like those in the neighborhood of 
Rome, would be covered with villas ; but such 
has been the insecurity of the country that there 
are none. Little villages here and there — Pa- 
tissia, Colonos, Ambelokipos, Kalandri — are 
sown over the plain ; but they all hover in sight 
like a hen and her chickens. I notice in the hotel 
this precautionary placard : " Gentlemen on the 
point of making excursions will please inform 
the proprietor twenty-four hours beforehand. " 
This is for the purpose of letting the authorities 
know of the intended journey in case an escort 
should be needed, or to keep them on the look- 
out. I can hardly realize the necessity for these 



1 1 4 GREEK ■ VIGNE TIES. 

precautions, all seems so bright and safe and 
open in Athens. But a. glass pointed at the sur- 
rounding mountain chains — the ridge of Hymet- 
tus, the passes of Daphne and Phyle, the peak 
of Pentelicus — soon discloses an absolute soli- 
.tude. Not a house, hardly a tree, is to be seen. 
It is as absolute a desert as the Roman Cam- 
pagna. Deserted as it seems, however, there must 
be vagrants and gypsies nested in this desert, 
for otherwise no precautions would be necessary. 
And when one remembers the terrible tragedy of 
1870, when a party of English gentlemen and 
ladies was attacked and four of the party mur- 
dered in cold blood at Marathon, just eight miles 
from Athens, one's archaeological fever abates, to- 
gether with the hankering after visiting memora- 
ble localities. At home one would take a horse 
and gallop all over the country without asking 
any one's grace. A guide-book and a blue-lined 
white umbrella would be all that should be nec- 
essary. I am perpetually puzzled at this sug- 
gested lawlessness of the Greeks. The country is 
small, everywhere penetrated at least by horse- 
roads and bridle-paths ; Thebes, Eleusis, Mara- 
thon, Delphi, only a few hours distant ; then 
there should be perfect safety for single travelers. 
The Athenians boast, too, of a high degree of 
civilization : a beautiful university, fifty period- 
icals, private and public schools, handsome muse- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 115 

urns, and thousands of school-children in Athens 
alone. Surely there should be some fruits of all 
this culture. 

The misery is that there is the ineradicable 
Klepht in the Greek nature. The Greeks will 
steal and murder in a noble sort of way now and 
then, and no civilization seems able to refine the 
instinct away. The Klephts are no doubt fine 
fellows ; they sing and fight well, and they did 
splendid service in the Greek war of independ- 
ence ; but it is time their thieving and murdering 
proclivities should cease developing and periodi- 
cally throwing the whole of Greece into a trance 
of fear. The accounts which Tuckerman gives 
of the panic at Athens when the aforesaid gentle- 
men were assassinated— two of them secretaries 
of the English and Italian embassies at the court 
of Greece — sound incredible. A handful of ruf- 
fians defied the entire Greek government for 
weeks, and half of them eventually escaped into 
Turkey, whence they had come. 

The traveler is irritated at the never-ceasing 
necessity to take a guide, to inform the hotel- 
keeper, to inform the police, to inform the am- 
bassador, to inform the government, of his (the 
traveler's) intentions, and to carry arms on jour- 
neys in the interior. It is all very well to talk 
about Turkish dominion, misrule, and influence 
lingering in the land. Two generations have 



Il6 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

grown up since the Turkish aristocracy, furnished 
with all the auxiliaries of modern life, — police, 
constitutional government, libraries, mails, steam 
communication, not to speak of the churches that 
dot the whole land, — and it is high time that the 
Greeks, if they are not a mere set of chatter-boxes, 
should give evidence of the salutary influence of 
these things by a complete extirpation of brig- 
andage. In the Ionian Islands, under the pro- 
tectorate of Great Britain, brigandage was un- 
known, admirable roads penetrated the islands in 
every direction, an efficient police was installed and 
organized, and an unrivaled prosperity reigned. 
I cannot see why the Greek government, embar- 
rassed though it may have been financially since 
1827, should show itself so impotent. Their silly 
and eternal caviling in politics, their intense par- 
tisan spirit, the acrimony of their parliamentary 
discussions, and the recriminations and taunts 
tossed about from side to side politically, fill the 
Phil-Hellene with despair. What is the use of 
their fine ftovXrj, and all their fine new boulevards, 
national costumes, and institutions, if this con- 
tinual shiftlessness is to go on? Happily the 
recent coalition of all parties under the leader- 
ship of the old hero Canaris seems to be leading 
to something like harmony. One sickens of the 
Aristophanic comedy of Greek politics. There 
are no parties, — why should there be partisans ? 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 117 

There is rarely any policy — why should there 
be any politics ? Greece is in the condition of 
bonhomme Chrysale in Moliere's " Femmes Sa- 
vantes : — ■ 

" L'un me brule mon rot en lisant quelque histoire ; 
L'autre reve a des vers quand je demande a. boire." 

In the government everybody wants to be in, 
therefore everybody must be turned out. Hence 
the perpetual motion, without progress, of Greek 
politicians. 

At 10 we left Phalerum, while Sappho was still 
shrieking out her swan-song. The prospect of 
our getting back to Athens more than counter- 
balanced any interest in the anticipated leap. 
In fifteen or twenty minutes we were at the sta- 
tion, where carriages and snug little omnibuses 
with mSrjpo 8pd/xos marked on them were in wait- 
ing for the passengers. An English acquaint- 
ance and I preferred to walk home, and stopped 
on the way to take Travwa (ice-cream), which we 
made the gargon understand by a combination 
of French, Italian, English, and Greek. The ices 
were delicious, and cost one hundred and ten 
lepta for the two, about twenty-five cents. When 
we first sat down to the wooden table and asked 
for ices, the waiter rolled his eyes wildly and then 
rushed off for an interpreter. The accomplish- 
ments of this personage did not extend beyond 



Il8 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

a few fluent words in the above-mentioned lan- 
guages, interspersed with copious parentheses of 
Greek. However, we finally came to terms and 
departed mutually content. One finds these re- 
freshments in general very reasonable at Athens, 
though it is impossible to praise the contents of 
the dingy confectionery shops. A quart bottle 
of red Cotes de Parnes which seems to be the 
wine preferred at our table d'hote, costs only 
three francs. And this, I was told by my loqua- 
cious newspaper correspondent, was quite dear ! 
The resinated wine is doled out at a penny a 
glass, ten lepta. Tobacco shops and wine shops 
constitute the chief objects along the streets. 
And yet drunkenness is so rare in Greece as to 
be almost phenomenal except at Easter. Every- 
body smokes a lean, hungry cigarette, more full of 
souvenirs of the kitchen-garden than of Turkish 
tobacco-fields. It is hardly an exaggeration to 
say that nearly every other house is a cafe. Could 
the tabernce of antiquity have been so numerous ? 
We know that these tabernce were crowded about 
the ancient agora, and that they were places of 
such disrepute that, though in extreme cases am- 
bassadors were sometimes lodged in them, there 
is a famous anecdote current about Demosthenes, 
who was observed in one of them by the lynx-eyed 
Diogenes, Demosthenes shrank back ashamed. 
" The more you shrink back," said Diogenes, 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 19 

" the more you will be in the tavern." Aris- 
tophanes smells of the pot-house, and I have no 
doubt that many a scene from his comedies was 
composed (mentally, at least) in just such dun- 
geons as I look down into every day as I pass. 
The same is said of Miiller, the genial caricaturist 
of Munich. How many inns have been the outs / 
of immortal things ! 

The new quarter of Athens is really beautiful. 
I went into it this morning. If the city extends 
and is beautified in a way like this, in fifty years 
it will be one of the finest capitals in Europe. I 
was quite amazed at the revelation. Hitherto 
the elegiac sentiment had prevailed, and like 
the Volney of " Les Ruines " I had been among 
the ruins, — on the Acropolis, or at the Olympi- 
eum, or tracing Pausanias, - — and had not discov- 
ered this handsome quarter, which extends diag- 
onally from the palace on the right. Spacious 
boulevards are opening and building up in sev- 
eral directions, lined by elegant houses. The 
ambassadors and elite of the city affect this quar- 
ter. The university is here, with its picturesque 
tropical garden, flights of broad marble steps and 
statuary at either end. By the side of this is the 
exquisite white marble structure (designed as a 
higher university, chiefly scientific, I am told), 
of the purest polished marble, with Ionic facades 
and Corinthian wings richly decorated with stat- 



120 GREEK VIGNETTES 

uary. The lamp-stands are beautiful specimens 
of sculptured work. It is a gift of a wealthy 
Greek, who bequeathed $1,500,000 for the pur- 
pose, $750,000 for the building and $750,000 for 
the endowment fund. The whole structure is a 
work of infinite grace, and produces a fairy-like 
effect in this lustrous light air. Beyond is the 
6(£#a\/xtarpetoF, or hospital for eye diseases (eye- 
sore), a building in polychrome, producing a sin- 
gularly bizarre effect by the side of its marble rival. 
Behind this row of buildings is the ^vaioypacfuKov 
Mvaeiov (Physiographical Museum), one wing in- 
scribed 'Ai/aro/xetov (Anatomy), the other Xyj^etov 
(Chemistry). The Post-office, BovXrj (Parliament 
House), and many very expensive residences, 
faced with marble and with richly decorated cor- 
nices, lie in this quarter. The 686s iraveTria-T-qiieiov 
(University Street) is even now one of the richest 
and most elegant streets I have seen in Europe. 
And how lustrously everything stands out in this 
divine air. Its lustre of gold and blue and white 
cannot be conceived in paler climates. The tall 
cypresses that stretch along the gardens are hoar 
with white dust. The oleander floats its fleet of 
delicate blossoms in every corner ; the mimosa 
quivers and the figs ripen in many a golden 
angle. Lycabettus stands behind all like a spe- 
cial guardian of the place. The cicada warbles 
serenely in the plane-trees. The hoar sunlight 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 121 

with the gorgeous magic of its touch evokes the 
subtle essences of the earth and volatilizes them 
into banks of lilied cloud. One is caught as it 
were in the focus of some saint's glory — a hur- 
ricane of soundless gold. The cicadae sing 
regular cadence, and ripple forth their undula- 
tory song in a rapture of light and joy. Clouds, 
wasps, and frogs dance an Aristophanic Ro- 
maika. 

But the heat and the hurrying light and the 
white dust accelerate one's pace, and one is glad 
to get within the shadow of some building where 
there is a nest of zephyrs in ambush. ■ I hastened 
on and got to the hotel to breakfast. The two 
ladies, my vis-a-vis, are, I find, daughters of the 
Russian consul at Smyrna, on a visit to Athens. 
They dress charmingly — airy muslins and white 
floating draperies. The supposed Frenchman 
turns out to be a colonel in the Russian army, 
General TcherniefT's chief of staff in the late war. 
He is said to have served with General Lee, and 
in the Franco-German war. He is supposed to be 
here on some mission. The Greeks are always 
supposing something about such people. Europe 
is run mad with diplomacy the whole livelong 
time. An official connected with one of these 
detestable little courts cannot turn his toes in 
without being suspected of a " mission." How 
thankful one is that our American foreign rela- 
tions are so plain and simple. 



122 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

I notice that the Athenians use quantities of 
these light-gray porous clay jugs for cooling water 
and wine. They are very graceful in shape and 
very light. In the market there is one stall with 
quite a mountain of them, and occasionally I meet 
a wide-panniered donkey laden with them. They 
are often seen placed in windows and on balco- 
nies, I suppose to catch the air, that evaporation 
may cool the contents. The public fountains are 
at all hours, particularly the classic hour of even- 
ing, crowded with Greek girls and boys drawing 
water and carrying it home in earthernware jugs 
of various manufacture. I see huge amphorae 
shaped exactly like those seen in the excavations 
at Pompeii. One would not have to go far to 
see the libetes, the krateres, and the cups of Ho- 
mer — not in gold indeed, except some in Dr. 
Schliemann's collection, but in clay in the hands 
of the common people. Nothing seems more en- 
during than the shapes and contours given to 
pottery. Whether a matter of taste or conven- 
ience, our water jugs and pitchers, crocks and 
bowls, have preserved all the antique points of 
utility, — the big belly, and broad foundation, the 
earthen handles and narrow neck, — while lavish- 
ing all the resources of silversmith, potter, and 
artist on their external embellishment. The iri- 
descent phials of the Egyptians are reproduced 
in the glass of Venice. The rich incrustations 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 23 

of Sevres are, as it were, the jeweled exudations 
of Etruscan ornamentation. Our taste is ques- 
tionable when compared with the Greek. Those 
carved surfaces, red or brown or black, with their 
simple and severe mythologic and linear orna- 
mentation, — that dance and rhythm of airy fig- 
ures wreathing the Greek vase, as in Keats's odes 
— are very different from the brilliant bizarre 
rococo of modern ornament : the grotesquerie of 
Dresden, the enamels of Wedgewood, the plaques 
of Palissy, Majolica, and Limoges, with their lux- 
uriance of tropical design. One longs for a 
simple Greek pitcher in all this demi-monde of 
jugs. There is the same difference between ro- 
coco and Greek art as between the perfumed 
feverishness of an Ode Funambuliste and one 
simple line of Menander. What a world of 
bright air and health and sweetness opens from 
the latter, what a dungeon of scented drawing- 
rooms and purple indolences yawns from the 
former ! In certain moments, then, give me the 
light-kilted Greek girl with her plain jug at the 
fountain, before all the painted poesies of French 
art ceramique. 

How delightful would it be, by the way, to 
have one hotel furnished from top to bottom 
a la Grecque ! The tawdry European furniture in 
Athens is a real eye-sore — dilapidated maple 
and mahogany, reps, French mirrors, and Not 



124 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

tingham lace. Why does not some enthusiast 
savant hotellier, like the proprietor of the Drei 
Konige at Basle, make his hotel a museum of 
antiquities and restore the house architecture 
and dining and sleeping habits of the ancient 
Greeks ? They are putting up vast ugly Euro- 
pean hotels here in excess ; why not a genuine 
Greek villa-hotel, frescoed, columned, full of 
light and air in sunny central spaces, with fount- 
ains and statuary and fish-ponds and gardens ? 
There is surely ground enough purchasable for 
such a purpose, and no modern comfort need 
necessarily be eschewed. The whole furnishing 
and decoration should be antique. Our Southern 
houses are full of delightful verandas ; why do 
not these foolish people, with a climate identically 
the same, introduce a similar style of house build- 
ing? Many new houses are going up in every 
quarter, yet people build as if they were to stand 
a siege — heavy brick or stone walls, windows 
open to intolerable dust and glare, small porches 
in front, put there solely to show off the beauty 
of a group of pillars, and blinding white surfaces 
of marble or stucco with absolutely nothing to 
relieve the eyes. 

There seems to be a lack of common sense 
among the Greeks, which was as conspicuous in* 
antiquity as it is in modern times. This whole 
plain, — think of it ! — the plain of Attica, might 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 25 

be planted with trees, and the valley of the Ilissus 
like the vale of Kephissus be made a laughter of 
light verdure and freshness. A slight premium 
set on the planting of trees would rouse the 
people to cover their slopes with greenness and 
thereby attract the rain and moisture for which 
the land suffers so much. The Khedive is plant- 
ing Egypt with trees in this way — ■ a far hotter 
climate. Napoleon instituted the same observ- 
ance among the French. Why could not olives 
and cypresses and plane-trees and sycamores be 
made to spread from Marathon to Piraeus, and 
from the pass of Daphne to the peak of Penteli- 
cus ? The soil is light, it is true, but it is produc- 
tive. Fruit is abundant, though inferior. If such 
a rock as Syra can be made the spring market- 
garden of Athens and Constantinople, — a rock 
which, when I saw it, hardly had the faintest sus- 
picion of vegetation on it, — I do not see why this 
plain, once celebrated for its fertility, could not 
be self-supporting. 

The Kephissus, the silvery genius of the Acad- 
emy, flows through a spot most beauteous for 
abundance and fruitfulness. The eye rests on 
its long plantations of olives and vines with de- 
light — one green spot in this scene of luminous 
sterility. There are charming drives through 
them, and secluded cicada-haunted hiding-places, 
where the spirit of Plato seems to tranquillize 



126 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

the air, and the murmur of melodious philosophy 
to melodize the spirit of the scholar. The pre- 
cincts of the Lyceum, the Olympieum, and the 
Museum, sacred to Apollo, Zeus, and the Muses, 
might be made to put on a like smile of radiant 
vegetation. Of course all this would involve ex- 
pense, and there is much to do. 

One is provoked when one sees a country so 
wholly given up to sunlight and idleness. And 
yet I am told that the Greeks are not idle. They 
will work all day if there is work to do and 
money behind it, stealing a siesta in the shade 
somewhere in the middle of the day and drawing 
their meagre pay at dark. This pay is not over 
two and a half drachmae per diem. They live 
on nothing — therefore like princes. Such pay 
is wealth to the liver on black olives. There is 
an ancient poet who celebrates myrtle berries, 
honey, the portals of the Acropolis, and dried 
figs — all delicious fare ! The Greek workmen 
are a fine, stalwart race, too. It must be pure 
air that makes them so, for they eat very little. 
The slouchiest-looking fellows I have seen are 
the soldiers and gendarmes. The painful red 
jackets of the latter are a focus of intolerable 
brilliance in this Greek fire of summer. The 
Albanian costume, hot as it appears to be, would 
be better than this poor imitation of European 
uniforms. Straw hats are as plenty as black- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. \2J 

berries. Everybody tries to be as cool as pos- 
sible, except the thick-stockinged Englishman in 
his tweeds and cheviots, To him a tall hat is 
as indispensable as his teeth. In England, any- 
thing but that would be decidedly out of taste. 
To the correspondent of the London " Times " in 
Paris, a soft felt hat goes together with a blouse, 
Belleville, and revolution. An Englishman can 
forgive anything except what he deems a certain 
indecorum in dress. That is unpardonable, and 
this unpardonableness attaches peculiarly to the 
straw or felt hat. It is his bete noire. 

— Thinking it would be less trying to-day we 
went out before breakfast and were literally swal- 
lowed up in the light and glare. I never knew the 
infinite blessedness of shade before. Everybody 
here clings to it as to a well-known indispensable 
friend. Pedestrians carefully seek it ; coachmen 
and their horses stand in it. As soon as the first 
speck of afternoon shade appears, the cafe people 
begin to set out chairs and tables, sprinkle the 
ground with water, and expect visitors, who soon 
come out of their nests in troops, and sit and talk 
the whole evening away. The light is exceedingly 
trying to the eyes. Get up early and sit up late, 
and sleep in the forenoon is the only agreeable 
division of the day. Even then there are long 
hours of insufferable heat. In my room there is 
fortunately nearly always a pleasant draught. It 



128 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

is absolutely necessary to put on a pair of black 
or dark blue glasses to look at the Acropolis with 
comfort, such a tide of blinding, bounding light 
reflected and thrown from house to house drives 
in through the green blinds. I am afraid the 
week I have promised myself there, studying an- 
cient topography, will have to be given up. 

How pleasant to lie in the shadow of the Par- 
thenon pillars, scan the environs with one's glass, 
consult one's guides carefully, and leave the place 
with some sort of knowledge of it — an amateur's 
orientation. If there is a group of mind and 
marble in the world that should be thoroughly 
explored, it is surely this famous hill. There is 
no better introduction to ancient history. Per- 
haps the finest view I have yet gotten of the Par- 
thenon was yesterday evening from the Greek cem- 
etery. This cemetery lies beyond the Uissus, on 
a slope, and the approach to it is by a long line of 
funereal cypresses. I walked out there to look 
at the tombs, several of which are magnificent, 
particularly those of Korais, the famous scholar, 
and Sir R. Church, the late commander-in-chief 
of the Greek army. Of course this cemetery 
lacks the sweet and holy beauty of the Protestant 
cemetery at Rome — that resting-place of famous 
ashes. There is an air of neglect and age about 
it, a lack of water to make things green and fresh, 
a carelessness in laying off borders and defin- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 29 

ing walks. Beggars crouched in the streets among 
the cypresses and called piteously for alms — al- 
most the first I have seen in Greece. Begging 
on the way to the grave ! I could not help pity- 
ing the poor wretches, while I hardened my heart 
and gave them nothing, for it is a good principle 
never if one can help it to give to beggars on the 
public highway. The Greeks themselves, espe- 
cially the lower classes, are extremely charitable. 
I lingered till the last beams of the sun were 
streaming gloriously through the pillars of the 
Olympieum, springing over the classic Ilissus, 
now stone-dry, and touching the hill where I stood 
with a gentle radiance. The sun sank behind the 
Acropolis and left a pool of golden light there, 
upon which the grandiose outlines of the Parthe- 
non stood forth in motionless serenity. Beams 
and parallelograms of light lay painted behind 
the looming pillars ; peristyle and pronaos let 
through the winnowing rays and threw them on 
the columned wilderness behind; the colored light 
shaded and whitened into the colorless empyrean, 
and gave to the mountains of ^Egina and Pelo- 
ponnesus an airy unsubstantiality. I had never 
seen the profile of the Parthenon projected on 
such a surpassing sky. It was a sky of Rhine- 
wine, upon which these beauteous forms were 
carven as upon some giant cameo. The Acropo- 
lis, with all its clustering shadows and colors and 



130 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

columns, was a heroic shield of Achilles graven 
on the plaque of the sky. This backward glimpse 
compensated me for the dust through which I had 
toiled shoe-deep to get to the cemetery. 

In the cemetery I found soldiers, a Greek priest 
or two in their ugly steeple-crown hat, and a few 
promenaders. There were lanterns attached to 
some of the tombs, and on many of them the jugs 
I have described, inverted on a stick. This place 
of death, instead of smiling with perennial ver- 
dure, shares in the general sterility of all this part 
of Athens, — a quarter once rejoicing in unsur- 
passed fertility. The bare hills lay burning in the 
sun, with hardly a wisp of grass or an aromatic 
weed growing on them. 1 

Coming back I crossed the Ilissus by a new 
stone bridge below the Olympieum, and found 
the bed of the stream perfectly dry except for a 
little drainage water here and there near the once 
famous fountain of Callirrhoe. It is only a few 
yards wide and with us would not attract the 

1 The associations of the place were not rendered more 
agreeable by recollections of the uncanny expedition with 
which the dead are hurried to burial in Greece — an event 
which takes place twenty-four hours after death. Bating 
this, and the singular custom of exposing the face of the 
dead on the way to burial, the Greeks treat their dead with 
great reverence. Tuckerman relates how, having an en- 
gagement with a gentleman on the day following a meet- 
ing, he sallied forth to fulfill it, and met — his corpse ! 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 131 

slightest notice. Yet what inexhaustible interest 
centres about it for the scholar. A few miles of 
intermittent water refreshes half the domain of 
Greek poetry ; the Kephissus and the sea mean- 
der through the rest. The microscopic scale of 
distances and magnitudes here is a source of 
never-ceasing surprise. One may have had one's 
Smith and Leake and Wordsworth at one's fin- 
gers' ends long before arriving in Attica, and may 
have known every measurement in the tiny com- 
monwealth ; still, on the spot, in the face of the 
gigantic achievements of these pygmies, one is 
lost in wonderment when one actually sees the 
territorial insignificance of their empire. 

Seeing a great number of people walking down 
a sort of wide boulevard toward the Ilissus, I fol- 
lowed and soon found myself in a sort of Athen- 
ian Champs Elysees. Kyjttos tcov xapircoF, Kfjiros 

TWV 'IAt(TO"t8a)V M.OV(TLQV, K.rjlTOS TWV aVTpOVTWV VVfJL- 

<£a> stood written over three gardens, in which a 
multitude of people sat eating and drinking. It was 
refreshing to see these beautifully wooded spaces 
in the centre of so much desolation. A band 
was playing in the Garden of the Muses of the 
Ilissus, but it was sadly out of tune. Dissonant 
cries from the waiters rose on every side ; a bell 
was jingled ; the cracked band broke forth into 
its wildest discord at intervals, and the people 
seemed to be in a state of holiday hilarity. The 



132 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

waiters in the cafes, I may remark incidentally, 
are singularly careless in their dress. They go 
about dirty, in their shirt-sleeves, often smoking 
cigarettes or cigars, with a smudgy apron and 
perhaps slipshod slippers on. I have noticed 
this even at the best cafes along Ermes and 
Eolus streets. There is no style about either 
the cafes or their attendants. The table ware is 
invariably dirty ; neat tables and chairs are per- 
fectly unknown except at the at 'AOyjvoll, the Belle 
Grece, and one or two other places ; coffee is 
generally served in small, dingy cups, with a glass 
of dirty-looking water, on a pewter or ill-plated 
waiter ; ice-water is doled out in niggardly doses 
in case you call for Traywra, and in the hotels only 
at table d'hote ; in short, the Greeks, though they 
live in the streets except in siesta hours, know 
nothing of even ordinary Parisian or English 
comfort. 

One would think that a hot climate would sug- 
gest a hundred devices and ameliorations by 
which to make life tolerable : floors carpeted 
with matting, window-awnings, verandas, cool- 
ing drinks, suburban or sea-side resorts, planting 
of trees everywhere, production of superior fruit, 
light and wholesome food, inexpensive baths and 
bagnios, — in a word, the most ordinary necessa- 
ries of summer life. As it is, hot carpets in sum- 
mer, heavy furniture, awningless windows and 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 33 

verandaless houses, drinks that heat up an al- 
ready exasperated body, a single poor little 
promenade at Phalerum, few trees, poor fruit, 
food rank with oil and condiments, and the ne- 
cessity to go miles for a bath unless one lives 
at a first-class hotel, ■ — such is the picture of 
Athens in summer. What it may be in winter 
I do not know. Then the cold is, according to 
all accounts, equally uncomfortable. Roots of 
olive-trees and scrapings of vineyards keep the 
pinched and peevish sojourner thawed — not to 
be euphemistic — at an enormous expense. The 
mountains around are sprinkled with snow, and 
the poor Greeks go lantern-jawed all the winter 
long, owing to their ignorance of the simplest 
household contrivances. So in these Armida 
gardens were the rudest arrangements for com- 
fort. I sat in the Garden of the Graces (!) and 
called — not for ambrosia but for a lemonade, 
which was brought by a slovenly fellow in shirt- 
sleeves. The whole thing was unclean— a scum 
on the lemonade, dirt in and on the glass, a 
pewter spoon, and an untidy tray. And this is 
one of the chief resorts in Athens ! 

At half past eight there was a play in Greek 
at the Apollo Theatre (®iarpov 6 'A77-0A/W) in 
the same cafe-chanta?it garden. This I enjoyed 
very much. The acting was good. I heard for 
the first time the Greek clearly and elegantly 



134 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

pronounced. There was a throng present ; the 
evening was beautiful, and we sat until twelve 
o'clock following the trials and triumphs of two 
lovers, sat under the stars, the night breathlessly 
lovely, the fragrance of oleanders breathing every- 
where, the bravos and laughter of the Athenians 
audible every few moments, and all about an in- 
definable pathos of passionate recollections. A 
modern comedy on the banks of the Ilissus ! But 
is not this Greek life an eternal comedy? Was 
it not a centuries-long comedy in antiquity ? Is 
anything more to be expected from these sunny 
people ? When I left, late as it was, there was 
still a third piece, more or less lurid, to be acted. 
The Athenians do not seem content with a little, 
they must have a long draught of pleasure. I 
heard the crowd returning about half-past one. 
In the intervals there was a little discordant third- 
rate music. This evening they have " Trovatore " 
in Italian at Phalerum. 

What tiny sheets these Athenian newspapers 
are ! Two columns of the " Tribune " would fill 
some of them entirely. They sell for almost 
nothing, a penny or ha'penny, and are written 
with a greater or less spice of pedantry. The 
dative and genitive cases, which the popular dia- 
lect regularly ignores, reappear in them with 
classic precision ; the vanishing nominative takes 
the place of the more popular accusative as sub- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 35 

ject ; the n in the accusative singular of masculine 
and feminine nouns, which is dropped by the 
people, studiously reappears ; and the iota which 
the people add in the accusative plural to certain 
nouns is carefully expunged. Thus people are 
getting accustomed to a classic standard ; the 
ancient Greek, as the old English with Tennyson 
and Morris, is the great source of neologisms, and 
antique phrases are gradually, almost stealthily, 
reintroduced from the pages of the poets and 
philosophers. 

— We set out on an objectless walk this morn- 
ing, and found ourselves after a while on one of 
the numerous dusty roads that lead into the olive 
grove, that famous bit of Athenian antiquity ; we 
wandered on and on until we got quite into the 
country, and found ourselves alone in this solitary 
forest. The day is delightful, — cloudy, with a 
fresh northeast breeze ; no dust. Yesterday on 
the Acropolis I felt the singular propriety of that 
marble group which so much struck Pausanias 
— Earth asking showers of Zeus. It is as if the 
breath of a furnace-blast had blown over this 
country and burnt up everything. Dust blows 
sky-high, into one's third story windows, over the 
house-tops and church steeples, permeating and 
penetrating everything with a fine white powder. 
All the vegetation is silver-hued with it ; it ca- 
reers wildly along the streets in great clouds, and 



136 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

blinds and suffocates everybody. Imagine, there- 
fore, how delightful to be out under these breezy 
olives, with the fragrance of a thousand aromatic 
shrubs and flowers in the air, threats of refresh- 
ing rain in the distant horizon, and innumerable 
cicadae filling the woods with their song. The 
shadows of the olives are getting longer over the 
road, and the afternoon is coming on. The cica- 
dse hum drowsily — their dream of summer light 
is short ; donkeys are braying and dogs barking 
afar off \ the scarlet blossoms of the pomegranate 
wave gently from out the bright green leaves ; 
fields full of low graperies scatter their scents of 
promised and ripening fruits ; peasants and coun- 
try people lie asleep in the shade ; the wind 
makes wavy and trembling melody among the 
trees. It is a Greek scene full of Greek sugges- 
tions. Not far off is Colonos, the birth-place of 
Sophokles and the scene of CEdipus' death ; little 
Greek chapels nestle here and there among the 
figs and cypresses ; the long white roads meander 
like a line of light through the olive solitudes and 
glooms ; a carriage drives lazily by at intervals, 
or a curious contadino saunters along, eying me 
and my book. What immense and strangely in- 
dividualized creatures these olive-trees are ! The 
trunks of many of them are positively huge. But 
then they are seldom more than eight or ten 
yards high, with a large tuft of out-spread foliage 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 37 

atop and on the sides. They line the roads and 
fill the fields like an apple-orchard. Fences are 
seldom to be seen. 

This grove is one of the most genuine relics 
of antiquity about Athens. Human hunger has 
kept it alive when all the marble glories of Peri- 
kles and Phidias have perished. And the Ke- 
phissus ? It is now perfectly dry, — a small chan- 
nel of mud and river jacks, bearing evidences of 
inundation, full of weeds and wild herbage, a fig- 
tree here and there growing out of its banks, — - 
hardly even what we should call a creek. It is 
as tortuous as some of these gnarled olives, and 
under no circumstances can be more than a few 
feet deep. Yet Plato and Aristotle, Socrates and 
Xenophon, delighted to walk along its banks. A 
sacred Olivet for the scholar is Plato's part of 
this grove — the 'A^aS^/xta, still so called by the 
Greeks. It is full of nightingales in the spring. 
Is it not as if one were not reading but realizing 
the " Phaedon " ? No doubt these small black ants 
that cover the whole face of the earth here 
covered it in Socrates' time, and perhaps crawled 
over the Son of Sophroniscus as they are crawl- 
ing over me — ants big and little, brown and red, 
and black and long-legged. The tufted grass, 
the donkeys going by laden with children and 
fruit and vegetables, the rooks that hover in the 
air and caw lazily — all, no doubt, were the same. 



138 GREEK VIGNETTES, 

The quaint little dogs, too, that snap at you now 
and then cynically — ghost of Diogenes, how real 
they are ! The whole place is full of the mellow- 
est music of associations. Greece is so inter- 
twined with one's earliest recollections by themes, 
versions, plays, prize poems, paper work (as the 
English say); boyhood, that poetic antiquity of 
each one of us of elderly age, is associated more 
or less richly with all these. And to find the 
mythologic and historic names more than real- 
ized in this classic grove to-day ! It is a dream 
which I should never have hoped to realize. 

"We arrived," said Hughes, describing the 
Academy, " at the banks of the Kephissus, the 
ancient rival of the Ilissus, and its superior in 
utility, flowing through the fertile plains which it 
still adorns with verdure, fruits, and flowers. A 
scene more delightful can scarcely be conceived 
than the gardens on its banks, which extend from 
the Academy up to the hills of Colonos. All the 
images in that exquisite chorus of Sophokles, 
where he dilates with so much rapture upon the 
beauties of his native place, may still be verified ; 
the crocus, the narcissus, and a thousand flowers 
still mingle their various dyes and impregnate the 
atmosphere with odors ; the descendants of 
those ancient olives on which the vigilant eye of 
Morian Jupiter was fixed still spread out their 
broad arms, and form a shade impervious to the 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 39 

sun. In the opening of the year the whole grove 
is vocal with the melody of nightingales, and the 
ground is carpeted with violets, those national 
flowers of Athens ; at its close the purple and 
yellow clusters, the glory of Bacchus, hang 
around the trellis-work with which the numerous 
cottages and villas are adorned. Oranges, apri- 
cots, peaches, and figs, especially the latter, are 
produced here of superior flavor; and at the time 
I wandered through this delightful region, it was 
glittering with golden quinces, weighing down 
their branches, and beautifully contrasted with 
the deep scarlet of the pomegranates which had 
burst their confining rind ; nor can anything be 
more charming than the views which present 
themselves to the eye through vistas of dark 
foliage : the temple-crowned Acropolis, the em- 
purpled summits of Hymettus, Anchesmus, and 
Pentelicus, or the fine waving outlines of Cory- 
dalus, ^Egaleos, and Parnes This para- 
dise owes its chief beauty to the perennial fount- 
ains of the Kephissus ((Ed. Col. 685), over whose 
innumerable rills those soft breezes blow which, 
according to the ancient muse (Eurip. Med. 835), 
were wafted by the Cytherean queen herself." 

— Yesterday all day long, I was on the Acrop- 
olis, studying out the topography of its temples 
and monuments. The day was one of the coolest 
and pleasantest I have spent here ; somewhat too 



1 40 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

windy, to be sure, but that made no difference, 
as there was little dust up there. I returned to 
dinner with a far more perfect notion than I ever 
before had of the plan of this celebrated place. 
With my glass too I discovered the circular 
monument of Lysikrates, which I had not before 
been able to find. It is in a labyrinth of crooked 
streets. The evening before I visited the The- 
seum and found the square in front full of new 
recruits drilling for the army. What awkward, 
clumsy fellows they were, too ! "Ei/, 8d> ! f 'Ev, Sw ! 
sounded from the drill-sergeant, who was trying 
to make them keep step ; "Ev, Sw ! f 'Ei/, Sw ! echoed 
from all sides, while the great temple stood there 
in the grand evening light, aghast at the inso- 
lence. An old soldier came up to me and said 
something in Greek, which I did not understand ; 
'AAXa, said he, then shrugged his shoulders and 
turned on his heel. A wretched little cafe is 
perched just in front of one of the porticoes of 
the temple, and a soldier sat drinking at a table 
placed between the pillars. A rich golden tint 
has mellowed the brightness of the Pentelic 
marble, the saucy little Greek church which had 
perched itself in the cella has been removed, 
restorations or strengthenings of the crumbling 
pillars have been made at several points ; the 
whole seems to be the object of affectionate 
veneration by the modern Athenians. But, as 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 141 

in Germany, there is hardly a ruin or a piece 
of picturesque ground that is not defiled by a 
hideous little saloon, as if the moment one 
arrived in the presence of a beautiful object, one 
then and there needed the assistance of some 
abominable drink. It is the same with the Tem- 
ple of Jupiter Olympius, where even nectar 
and ambrosia would be out of place, much more 
the cluster of foul little Kacfxpevela that one 
actually finds. Dozens of rude tables and chairs 
are placed around, at which people sit drinking 
coffee, smoking narghileh-pipes, eating micro- 
scopic ices, or sipping crassi. The latest phase of 
Greek politics — as changeable as watered silk — - 
or the legs of the last ballet dancer at Phalerum 
are discussed in the shadow of these glorious 
pillars from sunset to sunset. One's breath is 
taken away by such incongruities. And in the 
neighboring garden theatre Lady Jane Grey 
('Iwai/va Tpev) is murdered in five acts ! 

— - 1 write this sitting on the steps of the Bema, 
— a huge platform of rocks symmetrically hewn 
so as to resemble a pulpit, with a short rock- 
hewn staircase on each side, one of five steps, the 
other of four. The Bema stands on or rises out 
of two platforms, also of rock, and has a magnif- 
icent facing toward the plain of Attica, the vale 
of the Kephissus, the hill of the Nymphs, the 
Acropolis, and the Areopagus. Directly in front, 



142 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

on its own slight eminence, lies the Theseum, a 
rich mass of mellow marble, in this summer sun. 
The buttressed and many-walled crag of the 
Acropolis rises to the right and presents the mar- 
velous point d'appui of which the Attic orators 
were so fond in their speeches, beautifully en- 
crusted with its templed coronet of Pentelic, with 
the slope before it all covered with gigantic aloes. 
Lycabettus rises to the north, and to the south- 
west a sea of purple lustre mantles the Attic 
plain, Geronia, Parnes, Kithaeron, and the Pass 
of Daphne. There is no place in this lovely land 
whose associations are more eloquent. This 
rock is imperishable. It has not suffered in the 
earthquakes and bombardments that have shat- 
tered the Parthenon. The Athenians, Pericles 
and Demosthenes, saw from it, perhaps, as I see 
now, the diagonal bands of light and shadow 
which the pillars of the Theseum are casting on 
the cella of the temple, just in those delicate 
curves and undulations in which Greek art de- 
lighted. The Propylaea lift their sumptuous fa- 
cade in full view, and the dainty apparition of 
the Ionic-scrolled Temple of Nike Apteros sur- 
mounts its masonry with a winged and ethereal 
whiteness. Perhaps they even heard the guttural 
caw of the ancestors of the rooks circling over 
me, and filling the place with the superstitious 
awe with which the Greeks regarded the fabulous 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 43 

venerableness of some of these creatures, or the 
irreverence with which they associated them with 
their favorite oath. Surely, however, this hill, all 
girdled with august ministrations and habitudes, 
— the cavern of the Erinnyes, of Apollo and 
Pan, the Grot of the Nymphs, and the seat of 
the hoar and reverend court of the Areopagus, — ■ 
could not have been given up to the goats and 
shepherds and ravens as it is now. One can 
almost fancy one hears that famous speech of 
St. Paul's, as he stood here and cried, v Av8p€$ 

'AOrjvcuoi, Kara iravTa o>? SetcrtSat/xoi/ecrTepo'us Vfias 

Oewpco, — " Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in 
all things ye are too superstitious." The little 
Piraeus railway engines send their scream up 
here every fifteen or twenty minutes, and rudely 
tear one out of one's classic visions. A kilted 
goat-herd is browsing a flock of long-horned 
goats on this hill, so famed in Athenian politics. 
I even saw him hook three or four of them in 
the horns with his crook, and deliver them over 
to a wretch on horseback, who forthwith slaugh- 
tered them and sent their blood trickling down 
these storied rocks. The Bema and its steps, 
like much of the surrounding red marble rock, 
are covered with patches of golden mould, or 
lichen, which gives a vari-colored look to the 
whole. From the summit of the Bema entrancing 
views crowd in on every side. What scenes and 



144 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

associations unroll before one on this memorable 
height. Athenian citizenship, popular elections, 
the subtle and the florid oratory of Sicilian rheto- 
rician or Attic sophist, the infinite comedy of the 
Attic law courts, the multitudinous echoes of the 
final struggle for independence, — all are linked 
and anchored to this lichened rock. Everything 
about it is voluble and articulate with the past. 
How keenly one realizes Holderlin's verses : — 

" Attika, die Riesin, ist gefallen ; 
Wo die alten Gottersohne ruhn 
Im Ruin gestiirzter Marmorhallen, 
Briitet ew'ge Todesstille nun." 

The huge thunder-clouds of this morning have 
broken into pellucid and rainless sunlight. The 
mountains — the " purpureos colles florentis Hy- 
metti " — jut out sharply with a jeweled precision. 
Meandering roads curve along the sides of Hy- 
mettus * (mad mountain, the peasants call it) and 
Lycabettus as plainly as if they were a few yards 
off. It looks as if one might step into the gar- 
den that is laid off to the west of the Temple 
of Theseus. There is a white gleam on the tiny 

1 A curious etymology : during the Venetian occupation 
Hymettos changed to Hymetto ; the unaccented syllable 
fell away, and Monte Matto remained. Matto is Italian for 
mad. Cf. the legend of Mt. Pilatus in Switzerland — mons 
Pileatus, capped mountain, confused with the mediaeval leg- 
endary wandering of Pilate. 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 45 

church of Agia Marina, below the hill of the 
Nymphs, and I can almost see the mass of 
smooth worn rock where, following an ancient 
tradition, 1 women still slide down as a cure for 
barrenness. It is too early for the Place d' Amies, 
to the south of the Theseum, to fill up with the 
new muster. The temple is certainly a grand 
bit of architecture in this golden afternoon. 

1 See Taylor's Travels in Greece, 
10 



III. 

What a singular nest is the Stoa of Hadrian ! 
This once magnificent structure survives only in 
a few mutilated Corinthian columns, and has 
been converted into a sort of rookery of roosting 
peddlers. Its colonnades and temples, library 
porticoes and baths, its Propylaeum and spots 
of Orient sunlight where the fashionable world 
promenaded in the days of tke Phil-Hellene em- 
peror, are now what the Germans call an Eulen- 
nest (an owl's nest). All the tinkers and tramps 
of the Arabian Nights seem to sit there cross- 
legged, surrounded by piles of apricots and figs, 
pulling away at hookahs, or sipping their pa/a, or 
chewing /xacrrt^a, or taking the preparation they 
call Xovkovjjllol. It is the den of the Forty Thieves 
transferred to Athens and illuminated by an 
Athenian sun. There is no more amusing prom- 
enade in Athens than — if you have a good nose 
— ■ to walk through this quarter early in the morn- 
ing, and take in the whole oriental vivacity of 
the scene : little cafes, with rows of decanters full 
of green, red, and white liquids, and the curious 
little revolving machine which, driven by a stream 



GREEK VIGNETTES. itf 

of water, is made to strike two glasses, and thus 
melodiously attract the wayfarer ; little cigarette 
shelves hanging out of windows hired for the 
purpose, with their pair of huge brass scales, their 
boxes of kclttvos or common tobacco and their 
brands of 7to\ltlk6s (the Greek Havana) ; the 
water-cooler sellers with their heaps of graceful 
jugs to chill water by evaporation ; the groups of 
donkeys, with their panniers of fruit and vegeta- 
bles, and the huge brass scales pendent at the 
side ; the rows of small booths full of a Rag-Fair 
of articles — shoes, fezes, "fustanelle," rosaries 
made of shells, gay cloths and trinkets, fish, flesh, 
fowl, and fruit, all mixed in an indescribable pict- 
uresqueness and confusion ; and out of it all the 
minarets of a Turkish mosque climbing heaven- 
ward, with the cry of the muezzin, if it be even- 
ing. It is as if the many-colored dome of some 
cathedral had been shattered into a thousand 
pieces, and the many-colored pieces had suddenly 
become alive here ! It is a Midsummer Night's 
Dream of the maddest color, filth, and noisi- 
ness. 

Newsboys thread the winding passageways 
and cry, e H UaXivytveo-La (the Regeneration), or 
To IOvlkov Hvevixa (the Spirit of the Nation), 
at the top of their voices. Donkeys bray in the 
brusquest manner. Lively chatting goes on be- 
tween buyer and seller. Ancient Turks, perhaps 



I48 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

drowsy with opium or nothing to do, sit in the 
oriental posture or scratch their turbaned heads. 
Groups of men in the stately Albanian costume, 
with their grand walk and graceful air, stalk up 
and down with Eastern impassibility, price an ar- 
ticle, call for a <£arna (brazier of coals for lighting 
cigarettes) at the cafes, or converse in the strange 
patois of Greece about the last conclusions of the 
fiovXrj or House of Delegates. The Greeks are 
inexhaustible politicians, as they were in the days 
of Alcibiades, and they do not willingly let an oc- 
casion go by without a word or two on the future 
of Greece. Always the future, the To Me\\6v, 
never the present ! And when it is not the future 
it is the past — that burden of dazzling inherit- ■ 
} ance which oppresses the modern Greeks, which 
( makes them arrogant and contemptuous at efforts 
to suggest improvements to them, and which 
flings up their modern end of the scale, by way of 
comparison, into something like the Clouds of 
Aristophanes. An Albanian woman in scarlet 
fez and golden tassel may be seen here and there, 
going the market rounds and haggling in the true 
Ionian fashion ; or another in long petticoat, with 
embroidered sleeves and skirt, over which is a 
sort of tunic of white woolen, and hair and neck 
loaded with chains of coins strung together, stops 
somewhere in the bazaar, and passes a few words 
with a fruit vender; or the high boots of the 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 49 

Cretan costume stalk in now and then like the 
veritable puss in the fairy tale, and linger before 
some quaint stand loaded with appetizing mer- 
chandise. Small boys hang around bareheaded, 
and eye the baskets of nuts and dainties that 
the kilted peddlers carry about for sale, some- 
times venturing up with a few lepta, and going 
off triumphant with a handful of these delicacies. 
Wagon loads of perfect oranges block the road 
at intervals — huge, luscious fellows, yellow as 
gold and sweet as sugar, with a flavor and an 
aroma truly divine to the orange-liker. Pears 
hang in strings like sausages, and tempt the mar- 
ket-woman bent on a cheap dessert for dinner. 
Knots of Murillesque figures munch melons and 
figs in a corner, or perhaps carry on that opera- 
tion which Dickens describes as the chief Sunday 
employment of the Genoese. A man waters the 
street with a wet broom, and thereby makes the 
dust fly worse than ever. Platters of black olives 
shine on barrel-heads ; a brace of young fellows 
are eating out of a common plate in a sort of 
wilderness of tomatoes, fish, and butcher's meat. 
Mangy curs slip in and out, and snarl over their 
bones under the tables. St. Bartholomew's Day 
is revived on a small scale, but St Bartholomew 
baptized after the Greek rites. 

Up the street is the Tower of the Winds, but it 
seems to have transferred its Eolian versatility to 



150 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

this spot dedicated by Hadrian to Jupiter Panhel- 
lenius, but now the Pantheon of peddlers. Not 
many years ago dancing dervishes gave their per- 
formances here, as if to fill up the measure of his- 
toric incongruity. Greek and Muslim, hadji and 
archimandrite, mosque and minaret, agora and 
shrine — what a whirl of panoramic confusion. 
It is like a journey in a railway car, where fences, 
fields, sea, and sky blend in an indistinguish- 
able posy of dissolving views. Dirty canvases 
are stretched from side to side to keep out the 
cleansing sun. Immemorial fleas hop about in 
the fetid twilight. Those scavengers of the air, 
the flies, hold high carnival, and tattoo everything 
with their touch. At the end of a dark avenue of 
awnings is a burst of sunlight falling on the scar- 
let bellies of tomatoes, and giving lustrous focus 
to all these lines of light. At the end of another 
the sunlight has fruited into globes of golden 
oranges, that lie among their green leaves and 
make a glory in the summer darkness. Then 
piggins of white, cream-like butter catch the eye, 
cheeses in classic goatskins, great brown loaves 
of Attic bread (called ^to/xt) on the corners, and 
peasants roasting ears of corn in a brazier of 
coals. It is chaffer, chaffer, chaffer, all day long. 
Well does this spot justify its antique celeb- 
rity, for near here was supposed to be situated a 
subsidiary branch of the great Athenian Agora, 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 15 I 

that lay between the Pnyx and the Areopagus 
and converged and focalized the life of ancient 
Athens. Something of the same diseased instinct 
by which churches spring up perpetually on one 
another's sites is exemplified here. Churches, 
graveyards, and market-places have an elective 
affinity for the spots of their ancient renown. 
The gods, the graves, and the people will not 
give up sites once sacred to them, and succeed by 
a strange sort of primogeniture to their heredi- 
tary possessions. In the guttural twang of this 
market-place survives the silvery accent of Aspa- 
sia. In the fantastic Orientalism of the costume 
is a reflex of the white and blue and red of the 
antique figures that frequented these marble pil- 
lars and cast their painted shadows on the pave- 
ment. In the sharpness of these shrilly tongues 
is more than one reminiscence of the orators. 
One recalls the "swarms of chattering poetas- 
ters " called by Aristophanes " colleges of swal- 
lows." 

" Not tailed cicada, jay, or nightingale, 
Not turtle-dove or grasshopper can match 
Thy chattering." 

Jebb. 

In the wisdom of these terse proverbs — terse 
and Turkish and Athenian all in one — is more 
than one color from the palette of Theophrastus. 
The nightingales that sang to Sophokles in that 



152 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

exquisite chorus of the CEdipus are heard all 
about the Athenian groves still. There is per- 
haps an added note of pathetic richness since 
the grand old poet died, but the Greek poets still 
survive in their nightingales. So in this heap of 
pictorial nastiness there has been a miraculous 
preservation of habits and instincts. The brown, 
olive-complexioned lads and lasses have not been 
so Slavonized — pace Fallmerayer ! — that one 
cannot distinguish resemblance enough to the 
mutilated statuary through the museums of Eu- 
rope, nor is it the resemblance of a dead man 
across a glass case to his living self. Greece 
lives — Athenian loquacity lives in the fifty peri- 
odicals of the place. Athenian litigiousness lives 
in the animation of the courts. The panem et 
ludos live in the agility and frequency with which 
the Athenians, grasshopper-like, skip to the sea- 
shore and hang over the opera of Phalerum from 
evening to evening. The dead mountains live in 
their honey and marble. The Lyceum, the Cyno- 
sarges, and the Academy live in the university and 
the Varvakion. Nothing could be more living 
than the air and the sunlight and the olives, — not 
even the quick-stepping trot at which the droschke 
horses are made to go, or the quick spasm of the 
Greek speech — for spasm and sputter it seems 
to be — in a political difference at a cafe. The 
novelties intermixed with the antiquities of the 



GREEK VIGNETTES. I 53 

place do not jar on one so much as at other 
places ; as, for example, to find " Gocley's Lady's 
Book " on top of the Pyramids. The Athenians 
were ever receiving and absorbing something 
new. Their fleet, like a myriad nervous system, 
was ever bringing them new impressions and 
sensations. They had a plastic nature, like Alci- 
biades', infinitely adaptable to all circumstances, 
whether they sang at Syracuse or fluted at Sardis, 
whether they dedicated with the radiant irrever- 
ence of Aristophanes the finger and helm of 
Athene Promachos, or whether they sat under 
the solemn splendor of the stars in the awful 
court of the Areopagus. They are the harle- 
quins of history. 

What a stream of embassies and expeditions, 
truces and wars, processions and festivals, is this 
brilliant Athenian antiquity. It is a game of 
more than human athletes, and in everything they 
did there is nearly always, as it were, the perfume 
of some invisible ambrosial presence. Be it a 
song of Anacreon or a snatch of Sappho, be it 
the defense of Salamis or the chisel of Praxiteles, 
there is an unapproachable grace, an unreacha- 
bleness which we must ever despair over. The 
sting of such a despair is just the most exquisite 
stigma of art — just the stimulus that has driven 
the moderns to what they may have attained in 
art. We see it inserted in the thigh of the Re- 



154 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

naissance and spurring o.n the Italians to a 
frenzy of development, like some Jove-sent gad- 
fly. We cannot look into a studio or a cathedral 
without seeing the fruition of the Greek spirit. 
Here in Athens it survives to-day in the great in- 
tellectual activity that prevails, in the curiosity of 
the population, their eager thirst for knowledge, 
their numerous schools and rapid improvement 
in every direction. 

There is a keen love of money, too, coupled in 
many cases with extreme munificence. The old 
ardor of the Greeks cannot be put out in a day 
nor in a century. With Macedonia and Thessaly 
Cyprus and Crete, the Greeks would rapidly 
rise in importance and develop a real nationality. 
Now, of course, Greece is a mere mass of rocks 
and chatter. Athens is off the great lines of trade 
and communication, but by being made an intel- 
lectual centre is increasing far beyond any city in 
the kingdom. Its university will catch for it the 
miraculous draught of fishes — will, one hopes, 
be the great panhellenizing principle of this 
strange agglomeration of islands, peninsulas, and 
main-land. Twelve hundred students every year 
in a small nationality of one or two millions will 
carry forth enthusiasm for the new culture into 
all the provinces, and justify the help and inter- 
est of foreigners. Whether the government can 
grapple with its endless economical difficulties 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 55 

is a grave question. There seems to be a lack of 
astute statesmanship in this direction. But the 
ability of the Greeks themselves to make money 
and to prosper is unquestionable. They are the 
bankers and the money-changers of the East. 
There even runs a proverb about the Greeks of 
Athens on this point. But an intelligent Greek 
told me that the young men of Athens, \\ivXkoi 
iv rols aspens (fleas in the straw, he called them), 
instead of patronizing home industries "Will run 
to their tailors for a French coat, and spend all 
their money in foreign riff-raff. 

The term " French dressing " is sufficiently 
distinctive here to be put in inverted commas. 
But Heaven only knows what the Greeks would 
do if they relied entirely on themselves. A 
glance into their shop windows is almost comic. 
All sorts of miscellaneous stuff, odds and ends 
of ribbon and lace, heaps of common lawns and 
calicoes, bundles of ordinary white umbrellas, — - 
what seems like the refuse of the Parisian bouti- 
que on the boulevard Montmartre, — meet the eye 
in sorrowful abundance. Yet the men dress well, 
and the women of the upper classes too. The 
pai'fum violet and the modes of Paris flame here 
and there on gilded signs — signs unspeakably 
refreshing to the Athenian, who hurries by the 
little bits of diablerie called " native " shops, and 
finds relief in an adjacent cafe. Cafes are unfort- 



156 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

unately always adjacent here. At both elbows, 
in front and behind, there is no escape from 
their fumes till you are safe on the Acropolis 
or in the olive groves, — any more than there is 
from the grease and tomato sauce of the table 
d'hote. One picks up the bill of fare every day 
in despair to find "poulets a la sauce tomates," 
"gigot d'agneau aux tomates," "filet de bceuf a la 
sauce tomates," "ane roti aux tomates," " creme 
de la creme a, la sauce tomates " staring one in 
the face. Any civilized way of cooking tomatoes 

— baking, preserving, stewing, or in soup — 
seems utterly unknown to this tomato-ridden 
people. From daylight in the morning they 
begin to cry Tas roy/xdraq ! ras Tco/xaras ! in the 
street below, interspersed with short slices and 
spells of C H TLaXtvy evto-LOL, an everlasting news- 
paper. Greece would have achieved something 
long ago if it had not been for tomato sauce. 

— Then come beans and okra and pears and 
ras rw/xaTas again. This succession of shrill and 
unappetizing screams is anything but a pleasant 
preparation for the inevitable tomatoes which 
one is sure to find at dinner. There is an as- 
cending series of sensations — a gustatory stair- 
case — from the first cried tomatoes up through 
successive stages of grease and sauce along about 
midday, till the final and crushing culmination at 
table d'hote. The market-place bleeds toma- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 157 

toes ; they are hawked at street corners and 
howled on the house-tops, borne round by asses 
and bought by asses, weighed out by the pound, 
gleam through the twilight and gather at dusk. 
Well, America has given the Greeks tomatoes and 
female schools and missionaries ; who can say 
we have not done our part. There 's the table 
d'hote bell now ! Tomatoes, tomatoes, toma- 
toes ! 

It would take another Athenaeus to chronicle 
all the curiosities of Greek cooking. This morn- 
ing, descending gayly to our 11 o'clock break- 
fast I was greeted (breakfast, mind you), as the 
first course, with a plateful of rice saturated with 
grease and tomato sauce. This on a delicate 
stomach rendered almost morbid by long sleep ! 
Then came a dish of raw tomatoes, which I 
have myself introduced to the knowledge of our 
head waiter — a dish prepared in our favorite 
American fashion, and a thousand times more 
palatable than all their concoctions and confec- 
tions. Then the waiter brought in with an ar- 
tistic flourish a plate of indescribable stuff, a sort 
of sausage covered all over with thick white 
sauce and garnished with what tasted like boiled 
cucumbers. Then — but Heaven only knows 
what he would have brought next ! After the 
shrimps with olives that succeeded the soup at 
dinner yesterday, one was prepared for anything. 



158 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

But to our infinite relief he brought in a dish of 
delicious apricots, which with the vin de Parries 
somewhat counteracted the propylaea of grease 
which introduced the breakfast. Greek cook- 
ing is a mixture of Italian, Turkish, Albanian, 
French, English, and native customs. The thick, 
sweet, unsettled black coffee that succeeds every 
meal — more a confection than a coffee — is 
Turkish. The mountains of maccaroni dressed 
with tomato sauce and cheese are a souvenir 
of Naples. The frightful combinations of okra, 
beans, and tomatoes in which they envelop their 
lamb and veal must be purely and diabolically 
Greek, for I have never seen anything similar 
elsewhere. No wonder the Greeks are so slen- 
der — mere silhouettes of people. Such food 
would wear an Occidental to a knife-blade. It 
seems, however, to have had the contrary effect 
on the women, who at a certain stage of their ex- 
istence resemble bladders. They are human 
cucumbers that have lain too long in the sun 
and gotten yellow. — Our dessert yesterday was a 
cold rice pudding spiced with nutmeg and cin- 
namon and garnished with red and green iced 
cakes. The pie-crust, like the German, is sw 7 eet 
and heavy. On Fridays and Sundays sardines 
seem to be handed round as a sort of salami ; 
sausage croquettes take the place of fish some- 
times ; roast beef with salad of cucumbers, beets, 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 59 

and lettuce varies the usual fowl-ness of the 
last course. Yesterday nectarines and canta- 
loupe were added to our constant figs, apricots, 
oranges, and pears. There is Schweizer cheese, 
but only a Greek or two affect it. Wine in this 
climate is absolutely necessary, not only because 
the water is generally bad (lemonade color), but 
to help digest the ingenious horrors of a Greek 
dinner. Even the famous peTo-cvdro Kpaat — res- 
inous wine — could be tolerated in these circum- 
stances. And yet some of the Greeks — God help 
them ! — seem to thrive on their fare. The men 
are singularly handsome, while the married 
women seem to become immediately stout ; there 
is a strength and grace in the figures of the 
former that we should expect from their open-air 
life ; while some of the latter, though without the 
florid bloom of the Teutonic women, have yet a 
glow under their cucumber complexions that be- 
tokens health. Occasionally one meets with a 
very fine pair of eyes among them. Most women 
who wear the Albanian fez — whether from the 
unbecomingness of its flat red folds and tassel, 
or from the ungraceful way of dressing the hair 

— are homely. Not unfrequently braids of hair 
are wound round the fez in a very graceful way 

— in which case the fez is a mere red skull-cap, 
often subdued in color by a black lace veil. 
Many women of the lower classes wear our old- 



160 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

fashioned Southern bandannas, which give them 
a curiously mulattesque look. 

— Yesterday evening after dinner I strolled 
down the 6$6? 'A/zaXias by the palace garden, — 
which from four till seven in the afternoon is 
given up to nurses and baby Greek, — toward the 
Olympieum. Again and again I have to admire 
the wonderful aesthetic and pictorial instinct of 
the Greeks in selecting their sites for temples. 
Sunium, ^Egina, Olympia, Eleusis, Delphi, Delos, 
all emphasize and illustrate this. Points just 
where the morning rays may play about the 
sculptured pediment, or the western sun blaze 
pathetically on the columned whiteness of the 
posticum • points where the sea may be seen 
sending its sapphire lance into the land and carv- 
ing out a lustrous isle ; points where the ripple of 
a mountain outline relieves the delicately curved 
rectilinear lines of a stylobate, or evening-purpled 
pictures may be glimpsed through the pillars 
shining on the far seas, — all these they picked 
out with an infallible feeling of what was true 
and beautiful. There could hardly be a finer 
position for this great temple of Jupiter Olympius. 
The beautiful swell and curve of the eminence 
on which its fifteen surviving pillars rise, — fifteen 
out of the original one hundred and twenty-four, 
— its gentle slope toward the Ilissus and the 
fountain of Callirrhoe, and the angle at which 



GREEK VIGNETTES. l6l 

the Saronic Gulf sends its gorgeous blue laughing 
up the Vale of Phalerum, in full sight of the 
southern peristyle, make one indeed envy the arv- 
Xltyjs who in the Dark Ages made his hermitage 
on one of these pillars, and unwittingly selected 
a position that a very voluptuary in landscape 
might have coveted. Then the Acropolis just 
behind, with the Dionysiac Theatre, the Eleusin- 
ium, the Odeum of Pericles, and the Odeum of 
Herod encrusting its base. There is almost a 
justice in Hadrian's erecting his arch and mak- 
ing it a dividing line between the new city he 
built and these antique glories. 

I walked on and on, and found companies of 
soldiers drilling to a bugle and fife in the plateia 
or square which surrounds the temple. The 
coffee-drinkers were there too, and the hookah- 
smokers, reveling in the incomparable view from 
this spot, or lounging away the evening till it was 
time to go to the play. I went on down by the 
gardens of the Graces, Muses, and Nymphs, — 
which two latter fill the beautiful isle in the Ilis- 
sus once occupied by the shrine of Demeter, — 
crossed the Ilissus by a handsome stone bridge 
faced with marble, and went over to look at the 
excavations of the Panathenaic Stadium. On 
this spot were revived a few years ago the cele- 
brated Panathenaic games, in honor of the jubilee 
of Greek independence. The excavations at the 



1 62 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

back were carried out by order of King George I. 
a few years ago, and laid bare the entire race- 
course. There was the usual scabies of ignoble 
huts at the entrance, while the marble which cov- 
ered the tiers of seats had been converted into 
lime by neighboring kilns. How perfectly re- 
vealed is the site of this great Derby Day of 
Antiquity, the Stadium, — a huge parallelogram 
in the hills, excluded from all views of the sur- 
rounding country that might distract the contest- 
ants, except at the entrance, where the Parthenon 
stands forth on its hill like a glorious apparition 
and the Ilissus murmurs and meanders between 
the Stadium and the gardens and Aphrodisium of 
Venus on the other side. Few views in Athens 
must there have been from which the shimmer of 
sanctuaries through the cypress and oleander was 
excluded ! 

I could not help stopping and lingering over 
this glorious remnant of the religion and munifi- 
cence of early Greece. Such munificence — if 
not such religion — is to this day gracefully char- 
acteristic of the Greeks, and to it modern Athens 
owes the National Museum and the new theatre, 
the observatory, the Vivarkeion, the Arsakeion, 
and the new Academy. The theatre lay before 
me, all devastated and shorn of its glory. The 
excavations are sufficiently advanced to enable 
the antiquarian to reconstruct its original propor- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 63 

tions : nearly seven hundred feet (663) of white 
marble, the Spd/xog, the KafXTrrrjc, the /3a\/3Ls and 
the §iav\os ; its slabs and drains, its mosaic pave- 
ment and entablatured wall, its fan-like radia- 
tions of semicircular seats decorated with an owl 
at the end of each, its corridors, subterranean 
vaulted passage, and stoa, its statuary, its slope 
toward the classic Ilissus, and its sitting room for 
fifty thousand Athenians. The semicircular end 
is quite revealed, and all around is a multifarious 
debris of broken columns and capitals. It was 
not difficult to repeople it with animated thou- 
sands, or to fill it with a white-tunicked, sandaled 
throng. The bright blaze of multitudinous mar- 
bles, the stoa of the judges, the stripped runners 
with eagerly outstretched necks, the cries of the 
mobile and applauding populace, all seem to 
gleam and twinkle and echo along the air, and 
roll like a tide of color and sound against the 
cliffs of the Ilissus. What scenes must have been 
these famous games — games whose marble com- 
memoration alone excites so much admiration. 

Now in the diagonal distance stretches the 
king's garden and the stuccoed palace. Stuc- 
coed fences and gardens are springing up on the 
site of Aphrodite's temple ; small suburbs and 
clusters of new houses, Greek chapels, and /<a<£- 
(£eveta (of course !) are beginning to appear in 
the hollow of the hills and to form the out-works 



164 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

of a denser peopling and building up after a 
while. 

Greek priests promenade up and down the 
classic race-course in the cool of the evening, and 
an occasional antiquary may be found climbing 
and peering about, trying to realize and recon- 
struct the strange scene which this spot must 
have presented in Lykurgus 7 or Herod's time. 
Ruins of the marble-covered seats may be seen 
all along the south side, and broken slabs and 
columns lie about as reminders of the Panathe- 
naic pomp. Goatherds, such as they appear in 
the Greek novelettes of Achilles Tatius and 
Longus, drive their flocks about the declivities 
and dream in the midday sun under some tree 
or cool ledge of rock. The dry Ilissus has a 
cart track in the centre of its bed, and is as 
empty as a twice told tale. All along here new 
Athens is spreading. ZvOoiroXeia or beer-gardens 
are fighting for existence with the peecnvdro Kpao-l 
or resinated wine stands in this sacred vicinity. 
The near slopes of Lycabettus are gradually 
covering with new dwellings, shops, and inns ; 
7ravT07ro)A€ta or " notion " shops dot the hill-sides 
and obtrude their wares on the gaze. A ^a^ap^o-- 
7rAa(rretoi/ or confectionery presents its curious 
store of Greek and Turkish sweetmeats to the 
passer-by, but faintly recalling the famous dinner 
in Petronius. Perambulating candy sellers march 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 6$ 

up and down the locality and cry their dainties — 
candied nuts and bonbons, borne about in trays 
and baskets and dealt out in little tin cups. In 
the intervals of the play these marckands, as 
no doubt in Aristophanes' time, carry round 
little baskets divided into four compartments, 
and descant upon the deliciousness of their con- 
tents. And these are mingled with little raga- 
muffins who go about crying, Tu fiovKerTa, Kvpioi I 
to. /3ovk€ttol ! (Bouquets, gentlemen, bouquets !) 
The flower girls at Athens are boys —-and dirty 
ones, too, like the SovXot or waiters. They give 
you a great bunch of flowers for an obolus, none 
of them rare flowers, all bound in a tight nose- 
gay and wet with Heaven knows what. They 
are thrown in great quantities to the favorite 
actress or ballet-dancer (x°P € ^ T P a ) °f the evening 

— to actors as well. 

After a short inspection of the Stadium I 
went on down the Ilissus and back by the palace 
front to the Garden of the Nymphs, where the 
evening was spent in listening to one of Moliere's 
delightful comedies in Greek. The acting was 
admirable. It was Molieresque in every sense 

— broad, comic, spirited, and noisy. The cos- 
tumes were poor and plain, the scenery dirty, 
the orchestra a few T stammering fiddles and flutes. 
But in spite of all these disadvantages, counter- 
acted somewhat by the stars shining in brilliantly 



1 66 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

through the trees under which we sat, I have sel- 
dom enjoyed a theatrical representation more. 
It was an adaptation, rather than a translation, 
of the " Bourgeois Gentilhomme " ("Ap^ovro 
XoyptdTrj^), and its fun and frolic were rendered 
with inimitable humor. The audience resembled 
a highly charged Leyden jar. The least joke 
would touch them off into a rapturous sparkle. 
The songs were encored, and singers and song- 
stresses pelted with bouquets. The final song 
which I append, beginning, *Epw?, epws, a's Tepi/^w 
/xas Kpd&t, was received with delight. The play 
broke up amid universal good-humor. 

SONG. 

"OAoi Iv X°P ( P' 

,v Eptts ? epctis, els rep^cv [la's Kpd^ei, 
7) Kavdra trpbs iroaiv /caAet. 
"Ocrris 7rii/ei ttotg deu (TTevd^ei, 
dhv iparcu d>s Koprj deiXrj 

Keppare, Traidid, 
yefidra yvaXid • 
fie rairca xpvo"h> 
fteTcrivdro Kpcuri- 

C/ E£a> tltAoi, ao(j)(a nal <pi\ix7) 
<p€v ! ficopbs 6 aura iK^rjrcoi/. 
Elu rb irij/eiv, deiu^j iiri(rr'f}/jL7] t 
elv 6 epoos, 6ebs rcav fiporwj/' 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 167 

One cannot but think the modern Greek ad- 
mirably adapted to low comedy. The dialect is 
full of drolleries and droll turns. What is want- 
ing to the language — and that is a great deal — 
is made up by an astounding flexibility of feature. 
M. Jourdain's face was a real study. It was a 
comedy in itself. There was not the winged hu- 
mor of Jefferson, nor the least gleam of pathos 
(which the play did not call for), but just the 
most delicious jingle of fun all through. The 
adaptation was, of course, an unpardonable muti- 
lation of the great master's work, as much so as a 
plaster nose would be on a faun of Praxiteles ; 
but the surge and brightness of Moliere's genius 
broke victoriously through it and sparkled more 
brilliantly than the stars above us. There is a 
lightness and lissomeness in the Greek constitu- 
tion which peculiarly fits it for comedy. There 
is a buoyance of animal spirits, a breadth of sus- 
ceptibility, an activeness of perception, that com- 
bine the best qualities of the rose, the shamrock, 
and the thistle — the Keltic, Gallic, and English 
genius — in them. It is almost impossible to think 
of the Greeks as serious. They laugh at tragedy, 
and seem struck irresistibly with the comic side 
of it. 

How different was this dash of Moliere from 
the tragedy of e H Aal8t 'luavvj] Tpiv which I wit- 
nessed the other evening at the Apollo Theatre. 



1 68 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

Edward VI. was represented by a weak-kneed 
gawk in green pantalettes, with a suspiciously red 
nose standing out in haut relief from the rest of 
his powdered face ; Lady Jane was played by a 
stout, heavy-headed blonde, with no more anima- 
tion than a hogshead; the Princess Mary by a 
shrill brunette, who delivered volleys of high-keyed 
denunciation and had a pair of crank-like elbows 
which she worked incessantly. The Greek audi- 
ence fell into fits of exquisite laughter as scene 
after scene of intolerable bombast unrolled be- 
fore us. One really felt sorry for the poor actors : 
Lady Jane looked as if she had the mumps, Ed- 
ward was continually wiping his eyes and feeling 
in the region of his stomach, and Mary swept 
about like a hornet, stinging and slashing every- 
body. After three acts I left, surfeited with 
Anglo-Greek tragedy. And yet what drama ex- 
cels the ancient Greek in sweetness, seriousness, 
and majesty ? It was the intimate connection be- 
tween their religion and the drama, coupled with 
the finest art the world has seen, that solemnized 
an ancient Greek audience and overwhelmed 
it with a feeling of reverence. The myriad smile 
of Aristophanes, the finished comedy of Menan- 
der, whose divine " fragments " are almost equal 
to the Sermon on the Mount, give the more 
human side of this great scene of intellectual 
wrestling. We have here the Greek spirit vol- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 69 

atilized into a rare perfume ; rare as the aloe- 
blossom is rare — with all its strangeness. We 
cannot sympathize fully with their comedy as we 
can with the legendary adventures of Thor and 
the Berserkers in the Eddas, because it is part 
and parcel of their peculiar antique life and our 
plane is a different one. We can no more trans- 
plant ourselves into it, even through the most 
beautiful translations of Browning or Frere, than 
we can transplant this pure Greek air to shine 
over our mock Greek temples of the North. 
There is the difference which Sainte-Beuve no- 
ticed between ancient and modern portrait paint- 
ing, the one sunny and simple, the other wrinkled 
over with a thousand meanderings of painful 
thought. The morbid psychologizing of our day 
is and must be wholly unlike the bright health of 
ancient Greece. They had their sicknesses, their 
roOos or pensive yearning, but the feverish sad- 
ness of our day was unknown except in the golden 
decline of Theocritus' day. The passionate la- 
ments of Moschus and Bion, the delicate and 
dreamy beauty of Meleager, the vers de societe of 
the later epigrammatists, all reveal the first golden 
wing-tip of the butterfly born out of the ancient 
sunshine, scattered over with the opal spots of a 
newer life, tinged with a diviner tint of coming 
morn. How exquisitely do many of these epi- 
gram-writers sing their thanatopsis ; but it is a 



170 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

sharp, shrill cry, smothered as it were in the vol- 
umed melody of the present existence. There 
is no coarse luxuriating in weakness and disease. 
Compare the wit and wealth gleaned from the 
Greek graveyards with the funeral bombast of a 
modern cemetery. Compare the anthology with 
any modern " wunderhorn." The difference will 
come out strongly. 

From Greek cooking to Greek comedy ! But 
there is after all a natural connection. 



IV. 

The antiquities of Athens are soon exhausted. 
A mere pleasure - seeker would, therefore, soon 
abandon the place to its flickering heat, the 
cicadae, and the asses. But there is no place that 
is such a fountain of memories. True, the con- 
trast between former glories and present humil- 
iations is very great ; but the scholar's eyes are 
fortunately introspective and retrospective ; he 
thinks not so much of the squalid present as of 
the supreme past ; thus there is relief from much 
that would be intolerable in modern Athens. Sir 
Henry Holland, who visited Athens forty years 
ago, says, " Those who expect to see in Athens 
only the mere splendid and obvious testimonies 
of its former state will be agreeably disappointed. 
The Parthenon, the Temple of Theseus, the Pro- 
pylaea are individually the most striking objects ; 
yet it may perhaps be added that they have been 
less interesting singly than in their combined re- 
lation to that wonderful grouping of nature and 
art which gives its peculiarity to Athens, and 
renders the scenery of this spot something which 
is ever unique to the eye and recollection. Here, 
if anywhere, there is a certain genius of the place 



172 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

which unites and gives a character and coloring 
to the whole ; and it is further worthy of remark 
that this genius loci is one which strikingly con- 
nects the modern Athens with the city of former 
days. Every part of the surrounding landscape 
may be recognized as harmonious and beautiful 
in itself, and at the same time as furnishing those 
features which are consecrated by ancient de- 
scription, by the history of heroic actions, and 
still more as the scene of those celebrated schools 
of philosophy which have transmitted their in- 
fluence to every succeeding age. The stranger 
who is unable to appreciate the architectural 
beauties of the temples of Athens yet can ad- 
mire the splendid assemblage they form in their 
position, outline, and coloring, can trace out the 
pictures of the poets in the vale of Kephissus, the 
hill of Colonos, and the ridge of Hymettus, can 
look on one side on the sea of Salamis, on the 
other on the heights of Phylae. Nowhere is an- 
tiquity so well substantiated as at Athens, or its 
outline more completely filled up to the eye and 
to the imagination." 

— Yesterday evening, overwhelmed by the pe- 
culiar depression produced by the sirocco, I set 
forth on a walk along the Kephissia road, to visit 
the birthplace of Socrates and Aristides. As 
usual the rarest, tenderest evening sky, grand 
masses of haggard golden cloud behind Lyca- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 73 

bettus, the lovely bath of heathery rose-color suf- 
fusing the slopes of Hymettus and striking warm 
and rich in on the wooded cleft of the monastery 
of Kaesariani and its beautiful bright spring ; the 
lemon fields through which the Eridanus and Ilis- 
sus course, tinged with an indescribable softness 
of light and shadow and looking for all the world 
like a rich piece of golden brown sealskin. My 
walk led past the monastery of Asomator, on the 
site of the ancient gymnasium of the Cynics. In 
the distance outlying spears of Pentelicon, painted 
voluptuously by the pencil of advancing twilight, 
mauve and azure, with the glimmer of the dying 
sun on its naked limestone sides and the popu- 
lous village of Kephissia nestling at its feet, 
among the grapes and olives. One might al- 
most imagine this approaching night one of the 
Nodes AtticcE which Aulus Gellius celebrates, and 
which he passed on this very spot. Villages with 
strange sounding names are perched about, — 
Marusi, Kalavryta, and Ampelikopi, — and the 
most venerable of the Attic olive-trees thrive in 
this plain. 

A Turkish mosque peeps out of the foliage of 
a plane-tree in the distance. The aqueduct of 
the Pisistratidae runs along the hill-side and is 
still in use for conveying water from the chief 
source of the Kephissus, which is in this vicinage. 
Donkeys, dogs, and goats with their blue-stock- 



174 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

inged and red-vested attendants, rest along the 
road, grouped with that instinct of the uncon- 
scious picturesque which perpetually strikes a 
traveler in this memorial land. Carriages full 
of Greek Tra-mra;, as they call the gowned and 
bearded priests, pass to and fro. A band of the- 
ological students, also in black gowns and low 
brimless caps, stands at the gate of the iKKXrj- 
a-tacrTiKrj cr^oXr} (theological seminary) and re- 
spectfully listens to the discourse of the accom- 
panying master. One passes the TrTu>xoK.of±dov 
or poor house, with its neat garden, Byzantine 
chapel, and bareheaded guests sitting on benches 
in the open evening air. Several Zvdoir^Xeia or 
beer gardens, from which a decided whiff of aro- 
matic wine comes, are passed, as well as many 
new houses with women peering through the blinds 
— their eternal attitude in the East — or sitting 
on the balconies. 

The road rises and gives the loveliest glimpses 
of the coast of Argolis and the Peloponnese set 
in a jaspered floor of blue sea. Hymettus looks 
as if one could stretch out one's hand and touch 
it, or gather its pink wealth of wild thyme with 
which the air is loaded. The chapel of St. George 
on Lycabettus (now called Monte San Georgio, 
like so many other Italianized Greek mountains) 
is a spot of vivid whiteness on its remarkable 
height, and catches the blaze of the plenteous 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 175 

sun full on its front. The hamlet of Sypseli that 
clings to its side lies in a mellow bed of radiance 
which likewise luminously accentuates the white- 
sailed feluccas on the Saronic Gulf, far away to the 
south. Everything has the painted and poetic 
peace that hovers over a Greek landscape at 
sunset, an indescribable tranquillity and beauty 
springing from this world of harmonious tints 
and sounds. The heat is lifted from one's shoul- 
ders like a load, and there is left the upblowing 
and upbreathing coolness of descending night, 
a night that mellifluously veils the thousand-fold 
pungencies of a Greek sun and sinks down upon 
one with a sense of most eloquent relief. The 
aching eyes may be lifted painlessly to these 
cooling heights ; — the far glory of the sea is no 
longer a Medusa mask to turn one to stone ; 
the honeyed hillocks of Monte Matto are no 
longer focuses of a gleaming burning-glass ; the 
Parthenon pillars leave a sheen on the satin air, 
like the ripple of fingers in phosphorescent water ; 
the deep groves of Academe become the love- 
liest musing places for tired brain and eyes and 
feet; one may follow the horizon line with its 
successive tessellations of inlaid color, its twi- 
light green, its hues of silvery asphodel, its oc- 
casional great fans of shooting rays over Lau- 
rium ; the dust of the street is laid in the uni- 
versal truce, and the strengthened eyes may trace 



176 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

out the tortuosities of the classic rivers as they 
flow on and on down the plain. The indispensa- 
ble umbrella is thrown away or left at home. 
The thirst for ices and ice-water and cooling 
drinks is allayed, and one may move about with- 
out critical searchings after shady streets or 
shadow-throwing walls. Nothing could be more 
beautiful than these dewless Greek nights. How 
fast the shadows gathered as I continued my 
walk toward 'AA^e/o^ (Ampelikopi), the haunt of 
Socrates' youth, and gathered the delightful wild 
thyme, still in full blossom, by the way. I could 
realize the beautiful effect of those oriental pict- 
ures of evening that I have so often admired — 
the magnificent triangle of the Pyramids just 
touched in the trembling dusk by a ray or two, 
a fountain of Damascus with its romantic groups, 
a lagoon of Venice on which a lateen sail all 
gold and crimson lies bewitched. Delightful 
memories passed through my mind, and I found 
myself in unconscious harmony with the tranquil- 
lized sweetness of the scene. 

To walk in such an air and at such a time and 
in such a scene was in itself an inspiration. Re- 
turning I came back by the Garden of the Graces, 
but did not feel myself equal to the four-act 
tragedy of Lucrezia Borgia, in Greek, beginning 
at half-past eight. So I idled on and sat down 
among the ever-glorious pillars of the Olympi- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 177 

eum, which I return to again and again by a sort 
of fascination, not from their artistic merit, which 
is not very great, but from the grandeur of their 
isolated solitude and the indefinable harmony 
which exists between the curvilinear principle of 
their construction and the noble swell of the 
ground on which they stand. I am unable to 
define this subtle effect. It is like that " charm 
of married brows " which was so delightful to 
Theocritus and the epigrammatists. The empy- 
rean soon filled with its sparkling populace, and 
the mighty pillars lifted themselves heavenward 
as if themselves feeling some starry instinct. 
The block on which I sat had an inscription of 
great age. 

Besides the leprous-looking coffee-houses that 
have sprung up at the feet of Olympian Jove and 
desecrate the place, the peregrinating Greeks 
make these splendid columns a sort of undress- 
ing-room. It is the same with the tomb of 
Themistocles, the prison of Socrates on the Mu- 
seum Hill, the excavations in the Kerameikos, 
and every accessible monument a little withdrawn 
from the public gaze. Travelers in Italy will re- 
member the same practice of the Italians. 1 The 
habit is an heirloom of immemorial antiquity, and 
goes hand in hand, I suppose, with the filth of 
Martial and the foulness of Athenaeus. The Cam- 

1 See Goethe's Italienische Reise. 
12 



178 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

panile of Venice, and even the roof of the Cathe- 
dral of Milan, are made hideous by these things. 

There was a new moon, and its delicate curve 
hung just over the monument of Philopappus on 
the Hill of the Muses. Hadrian's Arch was dimly 
visible, and the obscure quarter of the ancient 
city was full of lights. The plaintive quiet of 
the scene was broken only occasionally by the 
monotonous cries of the garcons, whose custom 
here, it seems, is to call out what you have or- 
dered, as soon as you have ordered it, at the top 
of their voices and in a peculiar nasal and disa- 
greeable tone. But the great open space of the 
temple was too wide to render a little contempla- 
tion, even under such circumstances, unpleasant, 
and so I remained till a tolerably late hour. 

The heat is truly terrific. Perhaps one makes 
a mistake in venturing to Greece in the summer, 
for no one can be prepared for such a reception. 
There is nearly always a breeze, too, and the 
evenings are often delightful. But day after day 
of such experience is enough to melt one's brain. 
One feels positively sore at times. Add to this 
the continual puncturing of mosquitoes, and the 
impossibility of going out except early in the 
morning and after a five o'clock dinner. It is no 
wonder one sees so many people with blue-black 
glasses, linen clothes, and white-cotton parasols. 
One might go about in a carriage, at a drachma 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 79 

a ride, if there were anywhere to go, or take a 
horse, at eight drachmae a day, over the mount- 
ains to Eleusis, Marathon, or Delphi. But even 
this would entail a fatigue and exposure danger- 
ous at this season, and perhaps attended by the 
Greek fever. The marble monument at Colonos, 
erected to the memory of the accomplished Gre- 
cian, K. O. Miiller, is warning enough for the too 
ardent tourist. There have been shady, cloudy 
clays when I have walked miles with impunity, 
and explored the recesses of the 7reS< v 'Attlkov to 
my heart's content But this cannot be done 
every day. With the indigestible food, the ver- 
min at night, and the sun by day, one's health is 
in serious jeopardy by a prolonged summer resi- 
dence at Athens. The king has a villa at Corfu, 
whither he betakes himself in the dog-days. It 
is a delicious vision of verdure and freshness, 
called by its royal owner e H 'Avdwavo-Ls Mov (My 
Rest) j and it is no wonder that King George and 
Queen Olga, accustomed to the exquisite fertility 
of the green Danish fields, should flee from the 
sun-scathed hills of Attica during the summer 
months, and hide themselves here for a brief 
space. Most of the deputies, since the adjourn- 
ment of the fiovXr}, day before yesterday, have 
gone to their Peloponnesian, island, or main-land 
homes. 

The streets and cafes are full of war rumors. 



180 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

There are schemes of finance, schemes of mobili- 
zation, schemes of defense, schemes of offense, 
discussed and argued out at length over the thim- 
bleful of Turkish coffee. Mr. Skinner, the corre- 
spondent of the " Daily News," tells me that the 
Greeks are undoubtedly going to make a coup, — 
where, when, and how, he knows not, but he 
thinks the time has come and they are in the 
midst of silent but busy preparations. He was 
decorated by the king the other day, and is a very 
entertaining fellow. These warlike preparations 
are an additional reason for not prolonging one's 
residence in Greece. Quarantine, Turkish block- 
ades, and possible bombardment of seaport towns, 
are other elements of acceleration to pilgrim foot- 
steps. 

The Greeks blaze out in street oratory some- 
times still. Yesterday evening a brown-fingered, 
moustachio'd Athenian harangued the crowd in 
front of the palace square, with copious gesticu- 
lation. The only reminiscence of Demosthenes 
was the "action, action, action," in which he in- 
dulged. The crowd applauded the good hits and 
listened respectfully to the rest. One could not 
help thinking of the orators of old, and wonder- 
ing if their Greek was as indistinct as this man's. 
The Olympian Perikles in the open air on the 
step of the Bema crept into one's mind, with the 
eager crowd filling the Pnyx below, and the busy 



GREEK VIGNETTES. l8l 

scene of the great Athenian Agora just before 
him, surrounded on all sides by awful and ven- 
erable heights and associations, with the scene 
of ^Eschylus' " Eumenides " at the foot of the hill, 
and the height from which ^Egeus precipitated 
himself on his right. In what a robe of august 
memories was an ancient Athenian prjrwp envel- 
oped ! 

Some important excavations have been made 
in Athens since 187 1, in the quarter anciently 
called Kerameikos, near the church of Agia Tri- 
ada, at the railway station. The neighborhood 
was in antiquity a very celebrated one. Here 
lay the Dipylon, one of the fourteen gates of 
Athens, leading on the one hand to the Agora, 
Areopagus, and Propylaea, and on the other to 
the sacred road to Eleusis through the olive 
groves of the plain. Pausanias tells us of many 
notabilities buried beside this sacred road : Zeno, 
Perikles, Thrasyboulos, Armodios and Aristogei- 
ton, and others. Relics of the ancient wall have 
been laid bare, and deep channels of excavation 
run in various directions, resulting in many in- 
teresting discoveries : steles and slabs surmounted 
by fan-like ornaments, broken columns of dark 
Eleusinian marble, Pentelic sarcophagi, square, 
oblong, or simple, with beautifully polished sur- 
faces, lions in gray Hymettian stone, huge earth- 
enware amphorae with the bottoms drawn out 



I 82 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

to a point and recalling the origin of the term 
"tumbler," inscribed tablets, a square family 
burying-ground ornamented with sculptured ani- 
mals at the corners, remains of regular and po- 
lygonal walls, and half a dozen large and exqui- 
site bas-reliefs. The whole discovery was brought 
about by the unearthing of the monument of 
Lysanias. A great deal of speculation and in- 
genuity has been lavished on the graceful monu- 
ment of Dexileus discovered near this, represent- 
ing a knight slaying his opponent. Monuments 
of Aristonautus, Antipater, and others have been 
found here and removed to the cella of the 
Theseum. Many of those still remaining on the 
ground have been put in little wooden cages with 
wire fronts, which renders it difficult to decipher 
the inscriptions. They are, however, very neces- 
sary from the exposed position of the monuments. 
There is no other protection whatever to these 
valuable finds — save a sleepy fellow in a wooden 
hut near by, who pretends to be the custode of 
the graveyard. There are other fine reliefs quite 
open to any mutilator that may come along. A 
boy with a nail or a pen-knife may chip off what 
he likes. There are several parting scenes of 
great interest, slabs with numerous names in- 
cised on them, a stooping slave, the well-known 
group of " The Two Sisters," a bull with his legs 
broken off, lying on his side, besides numerous 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 83 

valuable fragments. This whole district is a 
buried museum. Further excavations will no 
doubt turn inestimable objects to the light, and 
reveal to us more perfectly the extent and pro- 
portions of this graveyard. At present there is a 
hopeless irregularity in the outline of the explor- 
ations, and they seem to run in every direction. 
A large building striped yellow and red stands 
right in the centre of the theatre of exploration 
— the Agia Triada itself. 1 

Lately I took a guide and made a pilgrimage 
to various museums and places of interest. The 
guide (Miltiades Vidis) entertained me with anec- 
dotes of the amiable and accomplished Felton, 
whom he said he accompanied in a three months' 
excursion through the Morea and Roumelia in 
1853. He spoke of Felton's wonderful familiar- 
ity with the Greek, and said (no doubt from hear- 
say) he spoke the ancient Greek to perfection. 
He mentioned Felton's anxiety to purchase the 
highly ornamented sarcophagus called the tomb 
of Theseus, and his vain efforts to carry out his 
purpose. Our point was the new archaeological 
museum on the Patissia road — a rather large 

1 See an interesting article by Percy Gardner on The 
Greek Mind in the Presence of Death, in which he has 
largely utilized the inscriptions found in these excavations. 
It is an interesting chapter in the culturgeschichte of an- 
tiquity. 



184 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

and ugly building of broken limestone, with 
beautiful steps and portico of Pentelic marble. 
The yard was strewn with spoils of various ex- 
cavations — sculptured sarcophagi (among them 
one fine one representing the myth of Bac- 
chus), steles, capitals, inscribed fragments — a 
wilderness of blue, white, and gray bits, all more 
or less mutilated. Most of the valuable collec- 
tion of antiquities that used to grace the cella of 
the Theseum, all of the valuable ones except 
the celebrated bas-relief of " Aristion," have been 
removed to this new establishment, where abun- 
dant space, beautiful light, and a series of hand- 
some marble-lined rooms enable them to be seen 
to advantage. I was particularly struck with a 
fine Apollo. Here are placed many of the sculpt- 
ured tombstones found in the Kerameikos — 
scenes of parting, cinerary urns, torsos of men 
and animals, almost indistinguishable from age 
and ruin. The fine figure found in the vicinity, 
with Egyptian head-dress, is here on a pedestal, 
as also several archaic Apollos, the double- 
headed statue found in the Stadium, and a great 
many portrait busts, which have been mounted 
in plaster and present a varied appearance of 
grotesque and hideous ruin. Miltiades insisted 
on many of them being " professors of the uni- 
versity," perhaps the remnants of Grote's pro- 
fessors, the noseless professores ordinarii et ex- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 85 

traordinarii of the Lyceum, Academy, and Cyno- 
sarges. The professors of the modern univer- 
sity all have their noses, I believe. There is an 
ancient relief in red marble, supposed by some 
to represent Diogenes and Alexander; another, 
found in the neighborhood of the museum, sup- 
posed to represent Socrates. But the condition 
of the museums of Athens, uncatalogued as they 
are, is shameful. It takes an acute archaeologist 
to derive any pleasure from an inspection of their 
contents. In not one that I have visited have I 
found a single description or catalogue. A visitor 
is thrown absolutely on his own resources, and is 
often left to his own imagination, for the igno- 
rant soldiers or women who guard these treasures 
know little or nothing about them. He is thus 
left to wander among a throng of perplexing mar- 
bles, often involving the deepest questions of ar- 
chaeology, with absolutely no help, except per- 
haps in obscure German or Greek archaeological 
societies' reports. And in such weather nobody 
is able to carry on the excavations necessary to 
disinter these reports — an achievement perhaps 
which, adding the tortuosities and speculations 
of the modern German and Greek archaeological 
schools, would be equal to Dr. Schliemann's. 
Consequently one is led around in these hospi- 
tals for crippled marbles like a child in leading- 
strings, and issues from the Pentelic porch more 



1 86 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

bewildered than when one went in. There are no 
labels, numbers, or descriptions whatever. Re- 
cent discoveries are therefore completely passed 
over, and for the old ones the visitor is remanded 
to an antiquated guide-book. It seems to me 
that in the boasted revival of Greek scholarship, 
of which one hears so much among the Greeks 
themselves, interest enough should be shown the 
visiting public to issue catalogues of the antiqui- 
ties scattered about the different museums in 
Athens, got up in some accessible and intelligi- 
ble form. These rooms and the yard in front are 
full of marbles that deserve such notice, and yet 
the Greeks, as Dr. Mahaffy says, are indignant at 
the retention of the Parthenon and ^Egina mar- 
bles in London and Munich. Sir Charles Tre- 
velyan writes sensitively on the same subject, and 
there is a tone of sullenness among the Greeks 
at the continued non-restoration. But, as Ma- 
haffy says, until the Greeks learn to take care of 
their precious monuments themselves, and show 
them a proper regard, it is far better for foreign 
countries to retain possession of the inestimable 
relics that they have carried off. 

From the museum, which is building in very 
beautiful and spacious proportions, but is not yet 
finished, we went over to the polytechnic institu- 
tion adjoining, but were only shown through the 
drawing and painting hall. There was nothing 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 187 

in this of special interest, merely a panorama of 
arid watery landscapes, figure-pieces, and studies 
imitated from the Italian. 1 The university build- 
ings were our next point — the pride and glory of 
regenerated Hellas. The buildings cover two or 
three squares. The university building proper 
has a fine entrance supported by two Ionic pil- 
lars of white marble. In front and to one side 
a charming garden has been laid out, and was 
bright with oleander blossoms when we visited it. 
The leaves, as everything else in Athens at pres- 
ent, are overlaid with a crust of hoary dust. We 
were shown the library, which, the librarian told 
me, is in a nascent state, is still but partly ar- 
ranged, and does not contain much of very great 
value. There are, however, over one hundred 
and twenty thousand volumes, mostly contributed 
by foreign nations, and due to the solicitations 
and patriotism of a former librarian. There is a 
pleasant reading-room — where I was delighted 
to see a large number of foreign and domestic 
periodicals; for the more light from without the 

1 Recent travelers report the almost non-existence of ar- 
tistic talent among the modern Greeks. There is no en- 
couragement for it at home, and the one or two Greeks of 
genius who cultivate art are settled in Munich or other 
European art centres, where their gifts are appreciated and 
remunerated. Even these form no distinct school of them- 
selves, but have been educated under the predominating 
influence of Piloty, Kaulbach, and the German school. 



1 88 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

less darkness from within. The university is 
poor, and the library, I believe, has no special 
fund for buying new books. It cannot, therefore, 
compare with the universities of Northern Europe 
in completeness of appointments. The librarian 
showed me some valuable manuscripts, an illu- 
minated manuscript of St. John of the fifteenth 
century, Chinese and Egyptian works, etc., and 
told me he was himself engaged in an investiga- 
tion into the relations between the ancient and 
the modern Greek dialects. He was very cour- 
teous, and seemed charmed to speak his native 
language (German) again. The library is open 
every day from 9 till 4, and is free to everybody 
— a delightful, cool spot, with a draught through 
it, shelves of ancient vellum, — bound books, 
busts of Greek patriots and scholars, and an at- 
mosphere of serene scholastic calm. The marble 
face of Lord Byron (6 A.o/oSo<? Bvpwv) glimmered 
in this shadowy sanctuary of letters, while busts 
of Korais and other literary or national celebri- 
ties stood in alcoves and watched over these 
germs of a new and nobler Hellas. It is through 
letters that the Greeks will, if at all, reconquer 
their lost supremacy. I was shown through the 
natural history museum, where troops of wan- 
dering peasants and poor people, hat in hand, 
were roaming and gazing with naive rapture at 
the stuffed birds and animals, and the anatomical 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 89 

lecture-room, but the great aula was closed, and 
the Suisse absent. 

The University of Athens is doing admirable 
work. There are some distinguished professors 
lecturing, the students are numerous and ear- 
nest, and there is everywhere a generally diffused 
intelligence. The only thing to be regretted is 
the astonishing number of lawyers and doctors 
which it is turning out. Young men come from 
all parts of Greece and Turkey, even walk to Ath- 
ens ; then they enter service as menials in private 
and public houses and carry on their studies at 
the university simultaneously. Medicine and the 
law are peculiarly attractive to them ; they plunge 
into the study of these professions enthusiastic- 
ally, and one result is a series of perpetual and 
perpetuated demagogues hungry for office, full 
of loquacious invective and insolence, bent on 
turning out whatever ministry is in, and getting 
themselves and their friends fed out of the pub- 
lic crib. In a comparatively healthy country, the 
physicians starve ; and the church, full of igno- 
rance, fanaticism, and poverty as it is, offers no 
career. There is the never-ceasing effort with 
the Greek to climb higher, to better his social 
condition, " to be as good as you are, and a littel 
better too : " hinc jus et medicina. The Greek 
mind simply needs to be turned away from the 
absorbing pursuits of commerce and politics into 



190 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

a literary channel to yield the abundant fruits of 
culture. The Greeks cannot go back to the san- 
dals and chiton of antiquity, which would be as 
successful as the pseudo-classicism of the first 
empire ; they cannot rehabilitate and edit their 
newspapers in the Greek of Thucydides ; but 
their natural quickness and shrewdness may be 
developed in honorable directions, their taste for 
classical culture may be enriched and deepened, 
and that remarkable imitative and assimilative 
instinct which they possess turned to sound and 
noble purposes. 

Dr. Mahaffy's assertion that a Greek peasant 
at first sight can understand the language of the 
Periklean Greeks as well as an English peasant 
can the language of Chaucer is surely exagge- 
rated. Miltiades Vidis, who is a dragoon of 
unusual intelligence, possessing a cj|j||fderable 
knowledge of several languages and tolerably 
well informed in the history of his country, tells 
me he cannot understand the ancient Greek at 
all. I inquired of him on this point particularly, 
and as he is one of a class of active-minded, to 
some extent educated, persons, who make it their 
business to be as thorough as possible in their 
special profession as guides, I am inclined to ac- 
cept his word on this subject with more satisfac- 
tion than the Phil-Hellene doctor's. The lower 
classes, indeed, are said to find the newspapers 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 191 

in which the new-old Greek is printed full of 
hard words, often utterly beyond their compre- 
hension. It is like putting a child to construing 
" Paradise Lost/' There are the sounds, the 
particles, the cries and catchwords ; but there is 
also a most formidable array of learned and ar- 
chaic terms, which to the ordinary Greek who 
may be able to read or write are little less than 
jargon. The influence of the university, the 
gymnasia, and the primary schools is fast tending 
to cultivate this class up to a comprehension of 
current literary Greek. But if any one takes up 
a newspaper casually — the Sroa (the Porch), the 
"Opa (the Hour), or the 'E^/xcpts (the Daily News), 
for example — and compares its careful use of 
prepositions, antique flections, and particles with 
the chaotic, flectionless, abbreviated jargon of the 
streets and coffee-houses, this wide distinction 
even between written and spoken modern Greek, 
not to speak of ancient, will come out strikingly. 
The girls of the Arsakeion are in their senior 
class put to reading Thucydides and the poets ; 
but in the same way as our students in their 
school work on Langland, Chaucer, and Wiclif. 
Morris, Skeat, Ellis, Sweet, as well as a thorough 
knowledge of Anglo-Saxon grammar, are essen- 
tial to our full enjoyment of the masterpieces of 
Early English. 

So, the ancient Greek, as a practically obsolete 



Tg2 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

and archaic dialect, must be critically studied 
and acquired before its authors can be fully un- 
derstood. Then, of course, as the last result of 
an accomplished education, comes thorough and 
spontaneous enjoyment. The phraseology of the 
newspapers becomes transparent enough to one 
thus cultivated. A foreigner of classical educa- 
tion can read these as he can read the signs, 
without much difficulty, for art and science have 
familiarized him with many special vocabularies, 
his classical reading recalls innumerable expres- 
sions, and the slight gauze of strangeness which 
the translation of the terms of European diplo- 
macy, politics, trade, and discussion throws over 
the subject is soon dispelled. In many points 
modern Greek is a far less highly inflected lan- 
guage than modern German, for example. The 
difference between its two phases is much greater 
than that between Goethe and the Lied of the 
Nibelungen. And it is hardly agreed that a Ger- 
man peasant can readily master the Lied of the 
Nibelungen. One has but to run one's eye 
through an ordinary " Manuel de la Conversation 
Grec Moderne " to see how the most usual and 
necessary words have a look and a substance en- 
tirely foreign to the classic. Many classic words 
no doubt survive, particularly in the less visited 
districts, — in Arcadia, among the Tsakoni, for 
example ; even Homeric and Hesiodic words 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 93 

may be found here and there, like the customs or 
the implements of ancient times ; but it is haz- 
ardous to insist too much on the similarity be- 
tween antiquity and the present. Take the sim- 
plest examples, the verbs to be and to have, and 
see what changes they have undergone. Then 
the important curiously abbreviated negative with 
the indicative (<kV for ouSeV), the formation of 
compound tenses analytically and by strange 
combinations, the peculiar way of expressing let 
with the imperative, the use of 6a with the sub- 
junctive and indicative to represent future and 
conditional relations, the new declensions and 
accentuation, the substitution of subjunctive for 
infinitive in numerous complexes, with their vari- 
ations no less marked. There is a strong resem- 
blance between modern and the New Testament 
Greek, particularly the Gospel of St. John and 
the Revelation ; and even the Septuagint comes 
in for its share of relationship and analogies with 
modern Greek. This fact is the less striking, 
since the language of the Septuagint version 
seems to have been markedly colloquial. 1 Per- 
haps when all the Greeks become as highly edu- 
cated as the annual thousand or so that attend 
the university, there may then be hopeful talk 
about a "restoration." As it is, nobody can ex- 
pect peddlers, barbers, washerwomen, and waiters 
1 See Geldart, Relation of Modern to Ancient Greek. 
13 



194 GREEK VIGNETTES, 

to discourse in the declensions and conjugations 
of Xenophon. Modern Greek conversation is 
full of the strangest solecisms. "EAa, e\a, is their 
cafe-cry for Viens, viens! The talk is almost as 
quaint as that of the Creoles of New Orleans. 

From the university, by the side of which is 
building the still unfinished National Academy, 
at the expense of the munificent Greek Baron 
Sinas, of Vienna, the noble structure in white 
Pentelic marble which I formerly noticed, we were 
driven to the BovXrj ( Voulee they pronounce it) 
or Parliament House, a plain, inexpensive build- 
ing costing about a million drachmae, and striped 
red and yellow. One cannot exactly admire this 
fashion of stripes and glowing color.- combina- 
tions, such as prevails often enough in the East- 
ern churches and public buildings. The cit- 
ron-colored Cathedral of Athens, with its chess- 
board bands of red, is too bizarre to make an 
agreeable impression. Ancient Athens, with its 
multitude and multiplicity of buildings, porticoes, 
temples, exchanges, arches, colonnades in white 
marble, must at different times have presented an 
appearance exquisitely and painfully beautiful. 
The transcendent whiteness of the light must 
have struck these polished surfaces, and in the 
noonday sun evoked an insufferable splendor. 
The Greeks would then, as they did, naturally 
take refuge in color, in gilt, in star-spangled soffits, 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 95 

blue triglyphs, gilded tympana to the temples, 
the profuse pillars dyed ochre, the labyrinthine 
draperies tinted and toned into something har- 
monious to the eye — a refuge from the fierce 
recoil and hostility of the sun. Accordingly we 
find remnants of color everywhere hanging about 
the architectural masterpieces left to us, and 
time has mercifully thrown over the noble suites 
of pillars the lovely golden tone which the Greeks 
produced at first artificially in the columns of 
the Parthenon. In their modern building vari- 
ous traditions are followed. Many private res- 
idences are fronted with white marble, others 
are in blue and gray marble or with white and 
blue blended ; some few are in the polychro- 
matic style. The Boule is perhaps after all more 
pleasing as it is, its ruddy tints blending har- 
moniously with the velvet air, though an Anglo- 
Saxon might prefer the cooler shades. The main 
room, where the Boule assembles, is an amphi- 
theatre with semicircles of seats for the depu- 
ties, a platform and ample desk-room for the 
president, and a bema or tribune for the speaker. 
Each seat is furnished with a plain sliding desk 
and writing materials, and there is a line of 
tables facing the first row, for the ministers. The 
ceiling is richly and rather gaudily gilded and 
painted, and is supported by two enormous pil- 
lars of grayish marble, which stand on each side 



I96 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

of the president's place, and rather singularly 
interrupt the distribution of the space, for they 
are not in the middle, nor to one side, but simply 
spring up like two gigantic exclamation points, a 
constant astonishment to the spectator. All the 
appointments — library, committee rooms, and 
reporters' gallery — are quite unpretentious and 
plain. The Boule is situated in new Athens, in 
the quarter of the clubs, consulates, and ambassa- 
dors. One marvels at the number of new houses 
building in this quarter, in fact everywhere in the 
city. 

These naked-legged, bag-trousered Nesiote ma- 
sons seem to do excellent work, too. Their work 
is slowly but, I am told, capitally done, with 
long siestas and resting spells on the part of the 
workmen, no doubt with a due regard to per- 
sonal comfort and the settling of the foundations ! 
When one reflects that the Parthenon was built 
in ten and the Propylaea in five years, one is 
rather amazed at the slowness of Baron Sinas' 
academy in drawing toward its completion. But 
then there were 400,000 slaves in Attica accord- 
ing to Demetrius Phalereus' census. Magical 
work can be done under such circumstances. 

It is a pleasure to see that the new streets are 
being laid out on the boulevard system and 
planted with trees. One comes on public wells, 
with marble headpieces and a carved dolphin and 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 97 

trident, everywhere in this quarter as in other 
quarters of Athens. The best water, however, — 
and very sparkling, cool, and delicious it is, for a 
w r onder, — comes from Hymettus and is sold in 
great barrels in the streets, at a sou a glass. 
Such water seems to be unknown to the hotels 
and cafe's, especially to the latter, where the 
water is detestable. These perambulating water- 
men with their great barrel on wheels, protected 
against the sun by thick matting and dried 
branches, and gayly decked with clusters of 
daphne blossoms, are a true blessing to thirsty 
Athens in summer. There is not a cupful in 
the Kephissus or the Ilissus ; one sees their 
dusty beds with the pebbles and mud swept into 
tortuous lines by the fierceness of the winter's 
inundation, and the downward bending and grow- 
ing shrubs hanging over, parched with imperish- 
able drouth. The sparkling wealth of jeweled 
water that is everywhere gathered into pictur- 
esque fountains and made to spout out of rocks 
and Tritons at Rome is sadly missed in this cli- 
mate. A meagre barrel or two may be seen 
rolled along the streets and ostensibly laying the 
dust, but really making it rise and curl like 
smoke under the tired wheels. This sprinkling 
is done on the principal thoroughfares once or 
twice a day, but with a necessary and chagrin- 
ing stinginess. At the hotels, except for the 



I98 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

meagre pittance of ice doled out at table d'hote, 
the water is blood-warm and rarely clean, fastidi- 
ous as the Greeks are said to be about their wa- 
ter and passionate water-drinkers as they are. 
Even in Hesiod's and Athenaeus' time there was 
a Greek 'alf-and-'alf, five parts of water to two of 
wine, or three of water to one of wine ; showing 
an early and ancient love of water. There is 
abundance of it, such as it is, but it rarely has a 
fresh feeling or taste, and the Greeks seem un- 
aware of the great summer luxury of washing in 
water that has just the jdaintiest suspicion of a 
sparkle in it. One sees innumerable Kovpzia or 
barber-shops along Eolus and Hermes streets, so 
that one would think a Greek's chief business 
was to cultivate the never-failing mustache, and 
get shaved and shampooed ; but I have noticed 
only one Kovpetov that seemed well appointed for 
this as for other purposes. We know from many 
classic passages what favorite lounging-places 
the perfumers' and barbers' shops were in olden 
times. — One feels uneasy, too, where one sees 
people always scratching. Unsavory suspicions 
obtrude themselves on the imagination, aided by 
uneasy nights and uncomfortable days. The 
Mohammedan's devotion to water makes us par- 
don a thousand shortcomings in him. But there 
is something ludicrously horrible in people being 
dirty with the sea singing in their ears all the 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 1 99 

time. This of course cannot be said of the bet- 
ter class of Greeks, for they appear to be exter- 
nally neat enough. One's attention is called to 
the subject by the general filth of the common 
people, the really abominable dirtiness of the 
garcons at the cafes, as a class, and the throngs 
of unregenerate wenches and brats one sees sur- 
rounding the wells of an evening. I have had 
but one or two clean glasses of water outside of 
the hotel since I have been in Athens. There 
is a general and hereditary smell of oil and gar- 
lic among the common people, which a frank use 
of soap and water would banish if it were not a 
smell by no means disagreeable to the Greek. 
One is irresistibly reminded of Trygaeus' prayer, 
that the market-place may be full of good things 
— " large garlic, early cucumbers, apples, pome- 
granates.'' One must say, however, in general, 
for the Greeks that they are cleaner than the 
Italians. A peep into an Italian trattoria is 
more than sufficient for an Anglo-Saxon. Light 
a candle suddenly after dark in an Italian cocma, 
and one will witness the scampering of innumer- 
able insects. 

Mediaeval Athens is to the last degree uninvit- 
ing. A few dilapidated churches are all that re- 
mains. There is what is called the Old Cathedral, 
built of massive blocks of white marble, some of 
which are said to have been taken from pagan 



200 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

temples. The style is Byzantine, and the church 
contains, besides some curious carvings, the em- 
balmed remains of the Patriarch Gregorius, mur- 
dered by the Turks in the war of independence. 
The churches of St. Theodore, St. Nicodemus, 
and Kapnicarea are all more or less insignificant. 
The Greeks have an uncanny habit of exhibiting 
the remains of certain saints on great spiritual 
and anniversary occasions. In Athens it is the 
remains of the martyred Gregory; in Corfu the 
desiccated skeleton of St. Spiridon (after whom 
about half the boys in the island are named). 
What is singular in the latter case is that the 
skeleton of the saint has for ages been the means 
of enriching the great Corfiote family to which it 
belongs, and by whom it is handed down from 
generation to generation as a money -making 
heirloom. Ten dollars will procure a sight of its 
blackened, emaciated, and jewel-laden toe. St. 
Spiridon is supposed to be a famous night trav- 
eler, goes on distant voyages, and returns with 
abundant sea-weed clinging to his skirts, which 
then performs miraculous cures on its fortunate 
possessors. One member of this lucky family 
must always be a priest in the church ; the thing 
is carried round in gorgeous procession once or 
twice a year, and offerings are poured into its 
shrine, which is the coffer-box of the family. 
— Yesterday afternoon Miltiades called for me 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 201 

again and we set out on a visit to the Varvakion 
(a museum - gymnasium due to private munifi- 
cence) and the Botanic Garden. Very interesting 
is the small collection of the Varvakion, which 
consists principally of terra-cottas, antique jew- 
elry, vases, gold leaf arranged in crowns for vic- 
tory at the games, glass, iridescent, pearl-colored, 
blue and green bottles, antique metal looking- 
glasses, pottery, marble statuettes, and a large 
number of miniature torsos in marble. I was 
particularly struck with some elegant gold arm- 
lets, bracelets, and ear-rings found together, I 
believe, in a tomb not far from Athens. The 
armlets were set with stones and the bracelets 
contained a series of very elegantly wrought let- 
ters. Small boxes of rare gold, silver, and bronze 
coins were kept in glass cases. The drawing on 
some of the vases was spirited and masterly, and 
many of them, though seamed with a multitude 
of cracks and fractures, had been very skillfully 
mended. The best thing in the collection (which 
is private), after the gold ornaments, a large vase 
representing a funeral scene, and a few very 
precious terra-cottas, was a head in relief found 
in the Stadium. This head has the most won- 
derful mirthful expression. The marble laughs 
and mantles with gayety, and the head seems 
bent forward eagerly, looking after some mirth- 
exciting object. The head-dress is very peculiar. 



202 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

I have never seen a side face that so shone with 
living smiles. The disk on which the head and 
face are carved is much mutilated, but the feat- 
ures are* fortunately intact. The marble, from 
its translucency, seems to be Parian. It is kept 
under glass and is highly polished. 

After our visit to the Varvakion, during which 
we were attended by a little red-eyed, bushy- 
headed gnome of a custode, who kept sniffling 
after us as if in deep grief, we turned our horses 
toward the Botanic Garden, on the sacred road to 
Eleusis. The garden looks like a country gentle- 
man's orchard and flower-garden together. We 
saw nothing particularly rare. Some fine pines, 
of the variety from which the resin is extracted 
with which they resinate their wines, a few splen- 
did silver poplars, a tank of gold-fish, and long 
sunny walks through straight beds filled with 
scented and flowering shrubs are the chief at- 
tractions. Gigantic Indian figs, crowded with 
flowers and fruit, lifted their embattled fronds in 
the afternoon glare, and seemed to resent our 
unwelcome intrusion. A few drowsy Greeks lay 
on the benches, or gossiped under the cypresses. 
The gold-fish — which strangely resemble the red 
mullet they give us for dinner, broiled in oil — ■ 
hovered near the surface of the heated water, and 
appeared, like ourselves, panting for coolness. 
Miltiades had the usual story of reckless English- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 203 

men (who no doubt transformed themselves into 
reckless Americans when required) bathing in 
the gold-fish tank one sunny day, while the labor- 
ers were at their siesta. Trumpet flowers, sweet 
basil (that favorite of Keats and Krishna), grape- 
vines, and sky-blue bell-flowers clustered on the 
walls, and gave delightful resting-places to the 
glare-wearied eyes. The apricot-trees had been 
stripped. The inexorable Miltiades was entreated 
not to lead me up and down all the shadeless 
lanes, and finally yielded. The subtle fragrance 
of the pines smelt like the opening lines of The- 
ocritus' first idyl, and recalled those graceful 
stone-pines that lift up their bosky crowns in the 
tremor and fire of the gold Italian hills. I pulled 
a sprig of sweet basil (O Boccaccio !), that royal 
weed, as a souvenir of our visit, and put it, with 
other sentimentalities, in a book. One can go 
nowhere in Athens without coming on pots of 
sweet basil, — in the windows, in the cafe-cor- 
ners, on the counters, and in the gardens. It is 
anti-malarial, and, like the gigantic sunflowers, 
that lift their solar blossoms all through the pel- 
lucid air of Greece, is purposely cultivated to 
purify the atmosphere. The light and the per- 
fume of the place were suggestive of the peren- 
nial rhododaphnes that warm the Greek hills in 
spring with their wild, winsome spray, and make 
a close room morbidly sweet. The most luscious 



204 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

fragrances spring up out of this light Attic soil, 
and gather into starry blossoms along the way. 
In the warm wet May evenings everything is brill- 
iant with glow-worms. Now it is beyond their 
time, and the grapes are beginning to get green- 
gold and purple-pink, with a dark spot on one 
side and a fruity smell of ripeness that magnet- 
izes bees and men. Nectarines are coming in, 
too, and the quinces gleam primrose-colored in 
their setting of green-white leaves. 

We summoned our ever-siesta-ing cocher, and 
then set out on the road home through the olives 
of the Academy, across the Kephissus, and by 
the "white-browed hill of Colonos." Miltiades 
pointed out an enormous olive-tree, which he said 
was twelve hundred years old. The olive is of 
exceedingly slow, almost imperceptible growth ; 
hence one was able to put more faith than one 
usually should, in such cases, in the age of this 
grand gnarled trunk, with just the slightest shoot 
of branches springing from it. The olives are 
gathered here in winter; in Corfu they are al- 
lowed to drop, and are then gathered ; in Zante 
they are plucked from the trees. When we rec- 
ollect what an important part the olive-tree plays 
in the matrimonial contract, — how anxiously the 
bride's parents inquire after their number, qual- 
ity, productiveness, etc., it is not difficult to un- 
derstand the care taken of them, and the tender 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 20$ 

and reverential regard with which they axe looked 
upjon. We drove along the winding road for 
some time, and had the purplest and prettiest 
glimpses of Athens through the frost-pale foliage. 
Hymettus was gathering its evening rose-color 
like a gauze over its naked shoulders, and the 
white sides of Pentelicus, where the quarries lay, 
shone drowsily in the fast-setting sun. This 
bright Greek air, with its spots of feverish filmy 
* color, transfigures indescribably when the sun is 
about to take leave of it. We passed along be- 
side rich orchards full of pomegranates and figs, 
between hot mud walls, and in blinding flour-like 
dust, over the Kephissus, and beside quaint sub- 
urban chapels, into the town again, to our oil 
and tomato-sauce table d'hote. The evening was 
concluded watching the twilight sea from the 
grand laure of the Olympieum, and laughing at 
the jokes of a funny little comedy in Greek at 
the Krjiros twv 'AvTpovTwv 'NvfAcfrtov (Garden of the 
Nymphs). 



V. 

Homo est quod est : man is what he eats. We 
have seen superficially what the Greeks eat. This 
is, however, by no means what they are. They 
are this plus an infinity of individuality. In a 
tour of a few weeks or months the most expert 
traveler can see only the physical aspects, the 
molecular mass (everlastingly in motion, too !) of 
this ingenious people. If " man possesses many 
internal qualities, such as the imagination and the 
milt, much more the Greek. Emerson called the 
English " this inconsolable nation," and says an 
Englishman's hilarity is like an attack of fever. 
What would he have thought of these feverish 
Greeks, this nation of fustanellas and mustaches, 
politicians and polichinelles, patriots and talk- 
ers ? "Ec^aye \w76v ! (he has eaten the lotos !) cry 
they of a man who has lost his senses. And 
then they attitudinize in the most picturesque 
manner and say AetAe! (poor fellow!) Lotos-eat- 
ing is the favorite occupation of this imaginative 
people, with its streak of Eastern richness and 
its gravity of the West. Attack a Greek on any 
speculative subject and he is as fluent as a pump. 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 207 

Answers he has at his tongue's end, though his 
arguments are like the Valencian sock — open at 
both ends. Mere fluency one sees in rivers and 
Greeks. Religion ? They will run over the Rag- 
man's Roll of saints and theologians from the 
Golden Mouth to Hagios Gregorios. Poetry ? 
An endless torrent of mediaeval Greek scribblers. 
Philology? The never-ending performances of 
Korais. Heroism ? Canaris ! Miaulis ! Karais- 
kakes ! Karaiskos ! 

There is something pathetic in this passionate 
worship of the heroes of the independence. Italy 
is the land of humanity, said Winckelmann. 
Greece is the fairy-land of patriots. How much 
better be an Albanian Klepht than, according to 
one, the Englishman who visits Mount ^Etna and 
carries his tea-kettle to the top ! The beauty of 
it all is that Greece has so gracefully forgotten 
the rags and roguery of these early athletes, and 
now embalms them in lovely ballads of Soutzos. 
It sees them with a glamour in its eyes — it for- 
gives and forgets. The long incubation of the 
Turks has hatched out a nest of scorpions. 
Never was such hatred as that written in Greek 
letters and gleaming in Greek eyes. Give way to 
the Greek for your vocabulary of hate. National 
aspects are mirrored in words, each a tiny bit 
of glass throwing back a thousand-fold image. 
Singularly rich is the Anglo-Saxon of Caedmon 



208 GREEK VIGNETTES, 

and Beowulf in words for " man," " hero/' 
" lord of life and light," " ship/' " journeying • " 
rich in words for "mist," " wraith," phenomenal 
weather aspects, are the Swedish and Norwegian ; 
and how Homer exults in his glorious words for 
battle-din, thunder of battle, battle-cries, car- 
nage, and brightness of battle ! But the idiom 
of the Greek eye when a Turk is mentioned is 
the unmistakable idiom of hate. " lis s'amusent 
tristement, selon la coutume de leur pays," says 
Froissart of the English. The Greeks take sav- 
age joy in denunciation of Turks and Turkey. 
And why should they not ? The Turks have 
punctuated their interminable edicts with Greek 
heads. The sad watch-towers of Turkish islands 
have been skulls of Hellas whitening on poles. 
Their dead march has been the cry of ravens on 
the battle-fields of Thessaly and Epirus. The 
heraldic bird of Mussulmandom is the buzzard. 
What strange stories we listened to in the long 
mornings of Athenian summer, as our English 
friend told us his experience in Crete, and set 
before our eyes ghastly rows of decapitated pris- 
oners ! The glowing sunshine looked bloodshot, 
and there seemed to be an effusion of blood in 
the air. Over Turkey there, hovers a sort of dia- 
bolic arch of crime, set there as an eternal prom- 
ise and menace. What can be thought of a peo- 
ple that has no heels to its shoes, indeed ? And 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 209 

a sac for a human heart ? To the Spaniard, says 
Hay, there is almost a feeling of immorality as- 
sociated with bathing all over. But how these 
people have luxuriated in their Turkish bath of 
blood ! The Castilian ladies used to glaze their 
faces twice a week with white of egg, in lieu of 
the abhorred water. Mohammedanism is this 
glaze. 

In the brilliancy and purity of this air one can 
see through and through, even to scowling Tur- 
key, on the horizon. The very clouds hang low 
there, as if full of hate. How beautiful and 
bright it all looks now in the poetry in which it 
has been enshrined : Mesolonghi and Patras, Na- 
varino and Nauplia. It takes but fifty years for 
a battle to become a sublime essence, a poem, a 
strain of music. Ascending to the empyrean, it 
descends through the marvelous channel of the 
poet's brain and becomes Balaklava, Inkerman. 
Every Greek mind is stored with these essences, 
poems, and strains of music. Marathon is as 
fresh as the last theft. Tall Greeks walk amid 
these memories and seem to grow strangely taller 
and graver. The boy Heine insisted that glaube 
was credit, not religion, in French. There could 
be no such fantastic prank among these clear- 
faced Hellenes. Whatever else they are, they 
are in earnest. Thousands of them devote their 
days and nights to cigarettes, but they do it with 
14 



210 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

quite a terrible earnestness. Perhaps Froissart's 
triste is the word of all words that describes them 
best except when they are listening to Jean Po- 
quelin's comedies. Then their intellectual plane 
receives a tilt, and they spin around like the 
radiometer on the point of its needle. Words- 
worth's 

" A yellow primrose at the brim, 

A yellow primrose was to him, 

And it was nothing more," 

can scarcely be said of the Greeks. They see 
deep significancy and symbolism where you see an 
asphodel or a Peloponnesian poppy with its black 
cross in its scarlet centre. If their mental nails 
did not grow inward and produce the torture of 
eternal recollection ! People who walk with 
hooded eyes, and, like some flowers, exhale only 
in the night, what can be expected of them ? 
Surely not a sensible budget, administrative 
reform, religious toleration, and macadamized 
roads. And for all these the Greeks have bound- 
less contempt. KaAa, KaXd ! they ejaculate, and 
let things wag on as usual, reminding one hugely 
of the Spanish crows that cry Cruz! Cruz! in 
perpetual reminiscence of the cross. KaXa (well) 
is the stock in trade of the defeated Greek when 
he has been overwhelmed in argument and been 
made to feel the incisive emphasis of compari- 
sons. The phrase is unique and significant. How 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 211 

much more respect could one have for the mod- 
ern Greeks if one did not unhappily remember 
that the word for " being a citizen " and the word 
for " marketable " {j:o\iT^vo\xai) are the same ! 
A strange hyphen connects these words, which 
cower under their common Romaic as under an 
umbrella. The swagger and stilts of the Astu- 
rian are theirs, too. Eyes will blaze and hands 
gesticulate if the divine right of Greece to be 
a nation be doubted. The doubt, however, is 
wholesome, and i*s continually suggested by what 
one sees there, eats there, feels and smells there. 
No nation has the right divine or diabolic to rise 
in revolt against the five senses'! If a man had 
sight only, how lovely would be Greece. But un- 
fortunately there are other senses equally im- 
portunate. A nose or an ear alone would be the 
greatest of misfortunes in Hellas. Let us cover 
the carrion, but not as Charles Baudelaire did, 
with a purple clout of verse. 

" Tutto e pace e silenzio 
E piu di lor non si ragiona," 

says the poet. These sad and unutterable soli- 
tudes of unpeopled Greece are full of pain. It is 
as of a fullness emptied, a sunshine disillumined, 
a country populous of ghosts and bereft of men. 
Including the cicadae, the country has about a 
million and a half of people. But every Greek 
considers the rest of mankind a mere multiple 



212 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

of zero, and he increases and multiplies in his 
own imagination until his numerousness becomes 
Greek for " dropping of water," myriad. The 
one hundred and seventy miles of length and 
one hundred and fifty miles of width of Greece 
swell in his mind's eye to an illimitable pampas 
and savanna smiling with fertility, and an avr}- 
ptOfjiov yiXaar/jia of grain. A shock to this illusion 
is the cruellest blow that could be given to a 
democratic people. The climate is moderate, the 
people immoderate ; the country is unhealthy, 
the people healthy. The Greek is always in op- 
position. No matter where you are, he is on the 
other side. His astronomical term is apogee, — 
off in the seventh heaven of delectable vision. 
Let him alone, and he will pin to his shoulders 
the wings of a butterfly, and soar joyously sun- 
ward. Then a ray scorches him, and he flutters 
in the lamp. 

One can never fancy a modern Greek in the 
attitude of Faust — deep in study night after 
night, and watching the moon shining on his 
Gothic vaults till wisdom comes. The moon is 
there, and the watcher, but wisdom cometh not. 
And there is such beautiful moonlight in Greece ! 
What is the use of so much fine talk among the 
Greeks, when Greece is always groveling in the 
dust ? Still it is well to remember that Mount 
Parnassus, with Pindar and Epaminondas, was a 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 21 3 

Boeotian belonging ; that the land of the stupid 
people culminated in the peak of the muses. 
Much may be expected from Greece in spite of 
flightiness, light-headedness, and anger. If sink- 
ers could be tied to their imaginations, they might 
catch fish. As it is, they are made of gas lighter 
than hydrogen. When one sits in their cafes and 
listens to their talk, one seems to be taking in a 
sort of ether into one's ears, and there is a delic- 
ious sensation of feet planted on nothing. Their 
talk is like whipt eggs. No sooner is a govern- 
ment or a coalition formed than it dissolves like a 
lump of sugar. And then recombination, Goethe's 
" application of a chemical principle to the moral 
world," takes place, to be succeeded by the in- 
stantaneous dropping to pieces of the same flower. 
A tourist must not become a regular newspaper 
reader while in Greece, for then "E(£aye AwroV ! 
Let him be content with eating leeks and minding 
his business. In Greece everything is bounded 
by water, and perhaps it is the eternal contempla- 
tion of this changeful element that has reacted on 
its inhabitants, and generated a moral idiosyn- 
crasy. There is even symbolism in the innumer- 
able islands-bits that light up the Ionian and 
^Egean seas, for disintegration is the watchword 
of the country. It is only astonishing that the 
slight umbilical cord of six miles that holds con- 
tinental and Peloponnesian Greece together has 



214 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

not been long ago severed. But the continual 
growl of the earthquake that haunts* the neigh- 
borhood of Corinth may be looked upon as the 
earth-spirit's dissent from the universal law ! A 
weak current of life circulates through this cord, 
and vitalizes the famished extremities. In the 
Peloponnesus, as in the Mediterranean, there is 
no tide. There is nothing but the dead glitter- 
ing sunlight, the scathed hills, and malaria. Eu- 
bcea, being under the influence of the Turkish 
rot, is rich enough, and stretches its long lance of 
verdure from Talanti to the province of Thebes. 
It is, as it were, the anthers of the flower, and 
scatters its golden pollen over the arid beauty of 
adjacent provinces. More than one half the 
country is occupied by rivers, lakes, and mount- 
ains, the other half by half a dozen people. The 
terrible sirocco blows over Attica and Morea, and 
knocks down your animated Greeks like a row of 
nine-pins • or is it the siesta that clears the mid- 
day streets ? The unutterable anguish of this 
wind cannot be imagined. You feel as if you 
had committed crimes, eaten garlic, or talked pol- 
itics. Invisible fingers play along your nerves, 
and drop a poison all through the system, which 
results in an indefinable woe and lassitude. This 
is the airy purgatory which Africa sends over to 
Greece to punish it for old scores. 

Among the Greek imports there are few ideas. 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 21 5 

Among their exports are much carbonic acid, 
folly, and inconsistency. The soil is said to be 
magnificent, but it produces nothing. To grow 
wealthy in Greece would be a paradox, for all 
leave the country, who can, and grow rich in 
Manchester and Vienna. The geographical feat- 
ures are reflected in the angular forms and indi- 
vidualities of the inhabitants. One must grant 
that there is a busy circulation of boats in the 
Greek harbors and round the coast, and in the 
vast inland gulfs. A sort of ergot has blighted 
the Greek mind while it was in the milk, hence 
the rarity of intellectual product. Greece is too 
near to the sun to come to anything. It is the 
apple of the sun's eye, and is burnt wheat-white 
nearly all the year round. The soil yields a few 
olives and grapes, and there are - eels in Lake 
Copais. Go to the Greek shops and find the 
rest, which consists principally of the shopman. 
One of the sorest disadvantages felt by Greek 
agriculture is said to be the lack of large and 
swift rivers. But I confess one is at a loss to find 
out what these large and swift rivers would carry 
off — Greeks chiefly, I suspect, A nation that 
follows Hesiod for its almanac will not grow 
pease, beans, and rice. What streams they have 
are running streams, hasting away with the fertil- 
ity of the land. And when, the skies water the 
land, the water flies away with prodigious celerity, 



2l6 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

and reenters the empyrean by evaporation. If 
there were rain in summer, the potatoes would 
be ready boiled in the earth. Scarcely cotton 
enough is grown in Argos and the Archipelago 
to clothe nakedness, and the dreams of their 
statesmen that these islands will one day com- 
pete with the Southern States and India are 
— dreams. As soon as a Greek has taken too 
much Kpaat — dreams; as soon as he lights a 
cigarette — dreams ; as soon as he is munching 
his favorite morsel of roasted pumpkin-seed — 
dreams. It is some comfort to Greece, however, 
that her currants help to make seven million dol- 
lars' worth of English plum puddings ; and nine 
hundred thousand dollars' worth of olive oil in 
1875 went into England's cruets. Despite Rhan- 
gawis' lovely allegory, the olive seems to be to 
Greece what the banana has become in the 
Indies — a source of laziness and demoraliza- 
tion. _ Its teeming and spontaneous productive- 
ness everywhere forestalls labor, and permits the 
wretched peasantry to go on in their squalor as 
long as a black olive will drop into their mouths. 
One need not reproach them for lighting their 
lamps with it, but when it kills out everything 
else except indolence, it becomes an evil. Look 
at our cotton-eating Southerners ! 

One is glad to find the Greeks too clever for 
drunkenness. Grapes are luxuriant, here and 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 21 7 

there, — chiefly out of Greece, in the islands. 
Perhaps immemorial wine-drinking has made 
them the spare, tense, sinewy people they are, 
burning them out like an inner sunlight, and 
making of them the half-translucent skeletons 
that we see them. A crust is left behind, and 
that too, cicada-like, hanging to the olive-tree. 
From the multiplicity of olive-branches there is 
no peace ; owing to the multitude of grapes there 
is no intoxication. The vine is the most prolific 
of Greek products except the Greeks themselves. 
As in most poor communities, children swarm, 
men and women are rare. The grape and the 
olive — peace and passion — intertwine and give 
birth to this population of babes. Think of the 
grape growing principally over the exquisite col- 
umns of buried Corinth and in the dells and 
slopes of Arcadia! One has a vision of white 
capitals and pillared stoas, peripatetic philoso- 
phers tangled in grape leaves, spells of Arcady, 
and peace on perfect landscapes. 

The Greek tobacco does not remain with me 
as of very delicious perfume. I have reminis- 
cences of half-hours of torture spent at cafes, in 
hotels, and on steamers, when I was forced to 
inhale the odors of the Argolic and Livadian 
weed, to the uncontrollable trouble of olfactories. 
When a Greek has smoked his hundredth ciga- 
rette, he begins to think of dinner. Hence the 



2l8 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

airiest of appetites. Send for a light, and the 
amiable gargon will come back smoking your 
cigarette for you. To such courtesy is this na- 
tion addicted. The wet and spittle-flecked paper 
is the waiter's offering on the altar of good-fellow- 
ship. For this reason one eschews tobacco in 
Greece or carries one's own Krjpia (tapers). Every 
minute the cigarette is out, and, as one said of 
the Iberians for the same reason, what can you 
think of people who trifle with their only occu- 
pation in that way ? Every Kacfafavtiov is a cloudy 
Olympus where the Pantheon is assembled under 
the leadership of Momus. The male Hebes of 
these establishments are of the earth earthy. 
Judging by what one sees, their chief food in 
summer seems to be cigarettes, nutshells, fig- 
stems, and orange peel. The sunniest apricots 
and goldenest lemons and whitest-blossomed al- 
monds are gone before the traveler comes. Then 
marvelous are the stories of Attic fertility, trop- 
ical crops, and felicitous seasons dropped into his 
incredulous ears. The figs are certainly as fla- 
vorous as they were in antiquity, and the fig-leaf 
as rare. They are greenish-yellow of aspect, 
pink and full of seed inside, and form a delicious 
thimbleful of aromatic fruit. They will not, how- 
ever, compare with the celeste fig of the Gulf of 
Mexico. With antiquity has disappeared the 
race of sycophants that used to give the Attic 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 219 

lawgiver so much trouble. A race of caterpillars 
that live on the inns of court has taken their place. 
If there were any figs in the country, beyond the 
absolute needs of the consumers, they might be 
exported without lese-majesty. But judging by 
the great numbers of griddles and fritters and 
quivering things, both alive and farinaceous, 
which I saw in skillets, I should say the modern 
Greeks speak historically when they refer to figs, 
and live on quite different fare. The whole 
quay was full of kicking and scintillating pans and 
braziers, when we landed at Syra and threaded 
our way as through an interminable kitchen. 
The cooks did not seem to mind the donkeys' 
switching their tails through the glowing oil 
every now and then, and seasoning the morceaux 
it was frying. It was all a delightful juxtaposi- 
tion and picture of oriental life, — oil and all. 

The guide - books have umbrageous stories 
about the forests of Greece, how they cover one 
eighth of the whole territory of the kingdom. 
I did not see them with my own eyes, and rather 
think the boskiness exists only in the fruitful 
fancies of the guide-book compilers. The Par- 
nessian, Dorian, Eubcean, and Acarnanian forests 
were famous for their density and beauty. The 
silk-worm might hypothetically (as what might 
not, all the world over ?) be cultivated with 
profit, if — But, adds the dolorous account, — 



220 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

an account as frequent as the ever-recurring re- 
sponse in the litany, — this resource also has been 
much neglected. Then it is useless to talk about 
imaginary localities which might be clad in silk 
and become luxuriant with mulberry. As it hap- 
pens, they are not, and our concern is with things 
present. We shall never see fustanellas of silk 
trailing this storied dust, or proud pallikars 
touching their silken caftans to the Phanariote 
aristocrats, at least not until Greece pays the 
interest on her debt. 

Mines and quarries ? There may be, as a French 
writer remarks, mountains of marble containing 
enough material to construct another Parthenon, 
only it will never be constructed. All that is 
needed is workmen and wagons. Precisely, — 
workmen and wagons, wagons and workmen, 
workmen and wagons, one goes on mechanically 
repeating as with an unmeaning phrase, in a 
country where nothing is on wheels. " The road 
is laid out from the mountains to the Piraeus," 
adds this writer picturesquely, " and from the 
Piraeus to the whole world." This is refresh- 
ingly like Herodotus describing the wonders of 
Egypt. It seems as if the Greek quarries of Paros 
and Pentelicus were to give us no more beauteous 
births of gods and goddesses, not only because 
the skilled human hand is no longer there, but 
because the brute marble itself cannot be got at 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 221 

or made accessible without great expense. And 
Italy loves with Buonarotti to linger among her 
own Carrara quarries in the hope that genius and 
memory may bring her a new renaissance. The 
Greeks know of the existence of lead, silver, 
emery, but this knowledge is as bad to them as 
the Anglo-Saxon poet describes the knowledge 
of good and evil to have been to Adam and Eve. 
The mere knowledge of good, with attainment on 
the other side of the sea, is a downright evil ; 
and so what belongs by right to Hellas is falling 
into the hands of greedy foreign capitalists, who 
are picking among the trash left at Laurium by 
the slaves of Nikias, and hope to turn a penny 
thereby. One can imagine the emotions of the 
people, as they stand by with empty pockets and 
see the foreigners filling theirs. The Greeks 
have not what the Germans call the Silberblick 
(the silver eye), for where it is raining silver to 
others, to them, poor people, it is a rain of lead. 
Not that they do not desire silver, of all earthly 
blessings and benedictions. The love of it has 
given birth — after laborious parturition, to be 
sure, — to really admirable traits in them. For 
example, brothers will not marry till all their 
sisters are provided for ; and there is careful talk 
about how many olive-trees a prospective bride- 
groom brings. On these will depend the happi- 
ness of the Psalmist's olive plants, who are to 
sit around the table. 



222 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

The chattiness of the Greeks may be inferred 
from the two hundred thousand telegrams sent 
over the telegraphic wires in 1875 ; indeed, what 
keeps the country from absolute inanition is the 
fifteen hundred miles of wires that connect it with 
itself and with " Europe." There are a few post- 
offices, but the letters and papers sent through 
them for the whole kingdom hardly exceed the 
proportions of Chicago. 

The Greeks belong to those unhappy people 
who spend more than their incomes. Hence 
tranquillity is not a nightly guest, and annual def- 
icits have not been opiates to an unquiet con- 
science. Think of bees being directly taxed to 
help out this pitiable state of things ! And then 
the gall mingled with that honey ! A matter of 
$75,000 or $150,000 on the debit side of the ac- 
count book is a formidable affair in this diminu- 
tive territory. Men shrug their shoulders and 
look grave ; the affair is a matter of life and 
death, orange-peel this year and pumpkin-seed 
next, through a series of excruciating economies. 
The floating debt is sinking the country, letting 
alone the enormous foreign debt of some eighty 
millions. This is no small matter to a land all 
beauty and brightness and aridness. Then pecu- 
lation has its pickings ; and pensions, civil-list, 
deputies, war-office, interior, administration, and 
collection of revenues come in for a share of 
plunder. 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 223 

The Greek fleet, such as it is, abounds in picto- 
rial names — Basileus Giorgios, Salaminia, Glau- 
kos, Polydeukes, Amphitrite, etc. Three or four 
hundred sailors constitute the working force, with 
half as many subalterns and a few officers. 
Greece will not dispute the supremacy of the 
seas with this force. But one should not smile 
at these Liliputian dimensions, or at the mosaic 
complexion of the army, with its tithe of nation- 
alities, like a pope's guard. They do what they 
can. And Greece has so long been a nursling 
of England that she is still as it were in her 
night-gown and nurse's arms — a dry nurse, too. 
A handful of Anglo-Saxons and a bit of Lom- 
bard Street would rehabilitate Greece wonder- 
fully. Pity that England did not take charge of 
continental rather than of insular Greece ; then 
perhaps there might have been twenty miles of 
roads or a navigable stream. As it is, one be- 
strides an abnormally gaunt steed, with a sort of 
wooden cold-frame for a saddle, and picks one's 
patient way over the blessed fields. And this 
Pickwickian jaunt is not interfered with by 
fences. 

A curious sort of religious toleration exists in 
Greece. You may practice your own faith to 
your heart's content ; but if you attempt to turn 
a Greek from the error of his ways, you may be 
thrown into prison. This accomplished people 



224 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

consider their religion ultimate, and proselytism 
treason. The Orthodox Eastern Church gazes 
on Roman Catholic performances with amused 
contempt. They consider them childish, super- 
stitious, and irreverent, forgetting their own fa- 
naticism, infatuation, and saint-worship. St. Spir- 
idon annually has all Corfu on its knees, doing 
obeisance to his wonder-working toe. One should 
like to know if this is any better than popish 
hagiology. Independent in all things, the Greek 
Church is a secession from the patriarchate of 
Constantinople, and has an incredible number of 
archbishops and bishops for the size of its do- 
main. The old scholastic quibble of how many 
angels could dance on the point of a cambric 
needle has become in Greece : How many bishops 
and archbishops can find dioceses in the ep- 
archies? There are no less than five of each in 
the small Ionian islands, six of each in the insig- 
nificant peninsula of Peloponnesus, and nearly 
as many for continental Greece proper. Some of 
the places are said to be purchased. Athens is 
the seat of the metropolitan, who is the apex of 
the ecclesiastical pyramid. Happy prelates who 
are paid by the state ; unfortunate subordinates 
who get precarious sustenance from matrimonial, 
baptismal, and burial fees ! One can appreciate 
the energy with which these good people marry, 
baptize, and bury. Every lover's sigh is to them 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 22$ 

a drachma ; every infant's wail a glad summons ; 
every cypress planted the symbol of content. 

" Come, come with me, and we will make short work ; 
For by your leaves, you shall not stay alone, 
Till holy church incorporate two in one ! " 

cries the friar in " Romeo and Juliet." 

It is hardly the province of a sketch-book to 
enter into matters of dogma and describe the 
differences between Catholics and Greeks. They 
are at one in four, and at variance in eight 
points ; the differences beginning with the altar- 
railings and ending with the mode of making the 
sign of the cross, and the agreements beginning 
in the mysteries of transubstantiation and ending 
in the mists of idol-worship. In spite of these 
harmonies and discords, which would seem to 
neutralize one another and produce peace, there 
is mutual abhorrence. Of course the celibate Ro- 
man despises the connubial Greek. Then there 
is unseemly squabbling over the sacramental ele- 
ments, over the observation of Easter, over the 
dogma of purgatory, and over the reading of the 
Scriptures. Into what infinity of detail all this 
enters is unknown save to the churches them- 
selves. It amounts, however, to sneers and laugh- 
ter on both sides. 

The same delightful vagueness about educa- 
tional matters among the women exists in Greece 
i5 



226 GREEK VIGNETTES 

as in Spain. We are told that even tolerably 
schooled Spanish senoritas cannot tell the differ- 
ence between a b and a v, and only seven or eight 
per cent, of the Greek women can read and write 
their own names. They are not by any means 
tongue-tied, as one finds when riding in railway 
carriages with them. Only a very small propor- 
tion of the women attend the public schools, and 
those of the better class have in the last forty 
years been educated by Dr. Hill, the American 
missionary. One is surprised now and then to 
hear the women talking English at the theatres 
in Greece. The general public-school system of 
Greece is elaborate enough, but there are, I think, 
more parrots than Porsons educated by them. 
Communal schools, Hellenic schools, gymnasia, 
and the university, constitute the fourfold divis- 
ion of the system. The communal schools are 
elementary, and include the three R's and bits of 
history, geography, and natural philosophy. The 
Greeks are too quick-witted to learn much. With 
them knowledge is inspiration and argument is 
assertion. They will run round the navigable 
and innavigable globe in less time than you can 
say Jack Robinson, and display infinite ignorance 
in the journey. And the institutions where all 
this is taught are open to both sexes. 

Then come the so-called Hellenic schools, de- 
voted to French, Latin, and Greek (with " pony- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 227 

ing " from ancient into modern Greek). To judge 
by specimens of table d'hote French to which I 
was inquisitorially bound to listen, I should say 
that the Greek French was at least as bad as the 
French Greek. And this, too, despite the Institut 
Francais at Athens, a colony of the University 
of France designed to promote classic and ar- 
chaeological studies. What the Latin is may be 
judged from the tortuous and torturing Italian 
which one takes down with the atrocious Szexard 
wine on board the steamers, on the quays, in the 
salons, and on the streets. Omnes vulnerant, ul- 
tima necat, read Theophile Gautier of the hours 
on the hour-disk of the town-clock of Urrugue. 
So with the Greek Italian. One delights to 
know that the Greek girls really read " Thouky- 
dee'des," as they call him, with fluency, in their 
upper classes. And from the facile and melodi- 
ous names appropriated to them — Nausikaa, 
Corinna, Sappho, Eurydike, Olympias — one 
might be misled to think they knew something 
about ancient history. Such is seldom the case. 
Then comes the next link, the gymnasia, high 
schools or ccoles superieures, where the scholars 
" pursue " (without ever attaining) Latin and 
Greek, and all the 'ics, 'isms, 'ologies, 'phies, 
and lingos embraced under logic, ethics, phys- 
ics, philosophy, French, English, and German. 
And after it all I met but one man that could 



228 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

speak English, two that could speak French, and 
none that could speak Greek. The Greek that 
spoke French was a Russian ; M. Evangelides 
had been educated in America ; and the Greeks 
had not been educated at all. What philosophy 
can be taught, or what logic, in this irrational list, 
or whose ethics is exemplified in the shops and 
izvohoyCia (guest-holders), one is in the so fre- 
quent predicament of the Greeks themselves — 
aTTopoq — to know. 

Last of all, like the impedimenta of some vast 
army, comes in the university. The course con- 
sists principally of professors. Students are ad- 
mitted and run up to large numbers. If the uni- 
versity did not turn out so many pettifoggers and 
theologues, it would be a really useful institution. 
Litigation would be less perennial than it is, and 
religion more religious. One cannot see the for- 
est for the trees, said Richter. One cannot be- 
lieve for the believers. Many men of celebrity 
have been connected with the university — patri- 
ots, statesmen, even scholars. It is of too crude 
growth and too recent establishment to ripen 
and mature the intellects of Greece. Hence the 
state of feverish inquietude, equinoctial uncer- 
tainty ; hence the " mothery " condition of Greek 
life. It is as with a young god full of the fury 
of some divine wine. The nation is ever reeling 
in political excitement, raging with dissensions, 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 229 

oscillating between extremes. It has waked in 
the night and is full of furious spring fever. It 
is not the still and solemn sea ; it is the edge of 
it as it lashes the shore in leonine surges and 
scatters spray to the stars. When the sun has 
sweetened and cleared all these wild juices ; 
when Greece has won the tranquillity of culture ; 
when the Boule ceases to be a marionnette thea- 
tre and becomes a house of parliament; when 
there is a head to these thousand limbs and a 
hand with a whip in it, — then the university 
will have accomplished its most noble missionary 
work. And not till then will there be citizens 
and scholars. At present one sees a nation of 
school children, satchel in hand, going to the 
newest sciences to be fed with the latest develop- 
ments — hearty, winsome, eloquent, and obliging 
children withal, but entirely too much given to 
gongs and pancakes. A sound castigation now 
and then from reasonable people, a decided set- 
down of national conceit, some glimmering intu- 
itions of the geographical proportions and impor- 
tance of other countries, a little logic of events, 
and economy both political and private, both in 
word and in deed ; these are elements towards 
the realization of that pining for nationality 
which has become a malady with the Greeks. 
It is useless to climb frantic May-poles and 
think to get a coup d'osil of the universe. Stay 



230 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

where you are, on the sober earth, with feet well 
planted in facts, no matter how the nettles sting. 
Then Soutzos' beautiful dream may again be 
realized : — 

Xtjpa (ieya?io<pviag ! . . . , elg Tovg Kolnovg gov to Tzakat, 
T 12 Tcarpic; fiov ! at Ideal av£[3?iaoTovv at [Ley'aXat ' 
Kal rvpavvoKTOvov %i(bog tipvirrovreg eig rag [ivpGtvag 
01 'Apfiodioi avupdovv hovofiovg rag 'Adyvag. 
"ATikoTe Qeol kirarovv to, edadrj gov, Kal -&eiav 
a E>o)g GT/fzepov rj yrj gov avadldet evcodtav, 

Kal 7j avpa tov ^vpov. 
lives t en ttjv apxaiav fzeXudtav tov 'O/uypov. 

I suspect the Greeks will have to come down 
to the narrow English notion of " comfort " be- 
fore they ever become anything. A nation that 
scorns many of the decencies and indecencies 
of life, that waives hospitality, that calls a pipe 
a smoke-syringe and a bed a wood-heap (fiAc- 
KpafifSoLTLov), that is devoured by mosquitoes and 
sun, and scorns sun-shades and mosquito-nets, 
that calls an individual an atom (aro/xoi/), an offi- 
cer axiomatic (afiw/xariKos), a port a pore (jropos, 
outlet), the spiritual life the pneumatic hereafter, 
and makes a ghost (o-tolx^iov, element) of Sir Will- 
iam Hamilton's stoicheiology ; a nation, more- 
over, that twists philosophical terminology and 
taunts a horse with being irrational (aXoyov, 
horse), takes in vain the fine old term of the 
Ionic philosophers, analysis, 1 the dissolution of 

i Vid. Geldart. 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 23 I 

the elements of created things in decay or death, 
and makes it dissolve a lump of sugar in the 
abominable black coffee of Athens, and turns in- 
side out the philosophic schema, thesis, and taxis 
of Democritus and Leucippus, and makes them 
mean respectively a monk's habit, a place in a 
coach, and a class in a steam-packet or railway 
carriage ; is such a nation, one breathlessly asks, 
on the way to political regeneration ? In the fine 
old Greek word for calm {yakiqvrj) the ancients saw 
"the smile of the sea" 1 (yeA<p). In modern 
times their descendants regard a calm, political 
or otherwise, as a great discomfort. Who knows 
what a little attention to Buckle's idea of the in- 
fluence of food on the national life would evoke 
in the way of health and wholesomeness in this 
southern latitude. " Carry biscuits and provis- 
ions," cried the Bayonnais to Gautier, on his way 
to Spain, in 1840 ; " the Spaniards breakfast on 
a teaspoonful of chocolate, dine on an onion 
steeped in water, and sup on a paper cigarette ! " 
And this has reduced Spain to what it is. 

Of national traits there are some most amiable 
ones ; of traitors no end, if one gives heed to the 
denunciations of the men in office. A word of 
abuse in Greece is always something concrete ; a 
man who does not believe your way, or go the 
length of your tether, is a dog, an assassin, an ass, 
1 Vid. Geldart. 



232 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

an idiot. No sooner does a man climb to the 
height of his ambition, than people drag him 
down to the depth of theirs. Nameless crimes 
have been attributed to one of the best and 
gentlest of kings. If their majesties gave a ball 
every night in the year, it would not stop the 
busy feet of the guests from kicking at them. As 
the king is blond, they want him brun ; as he is 
short, they want him tall ; as he is young, they 
want him old. As for the queen, she is a Rus- 
sian. Fortunately the children have all been 
born in Greece, and there is a slight hope that the 
Greeks will at last have a Hellenic king, and 
the present Danish dynasty be perpetuated. A 
child must be named Constantine, in view of the 
immemorial hope of a restoration of the empire of 
Constantine the Great. There is something pa- 
thetic in the polygot of languages with which such 
a royal child must be tormented : Danish, Rus- 
sian, Greek, Italian, English, French, and German. 
In the acquisition of these, kings forget to be con- 
stitutional. In conning their Ollendorff, they 
neglect the law. In the purgatory of irregular 
verbs, they hear not the cries of their subjects. 
Genders are to them more than genius, and felic- 
ity of phrase than the greatest common good. 
Both Otho and George were taken young, no 
doubt that they might overcome the difficulties of 
modern Greek. The one acquired the language 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 233 

and lost his kingdom. The other rules to-day- 
surrounded by a troop of light-haired, happy- 
hearted Danish children, with his queen Olga of 
the golden hair and wonderful complexion. And 
she with her low-bodiced dames of honor, her vast 
palace, her carriages and horses, and her charm- 
ing garden, loses hardly more than three nights' 
rest a week in dread of revolution. Whether any 
one of her bright princes and princesses will ever 
sit on the throne of Greece no doubt affords the 
royal mother many an hour of anxiety. Nobody 
else seems anxious. To hear the Greeks talk, now 
and then, one would think they adored their rulers 
and prayed for their health and wealth every hour 
in the day. So they did with poor Otho, till one 
morning he went on a visit to the Peloponnesus, 
and — never came back again. A king on the 
throne of Greece is in the attitude of the Parisian 
who works the spiral velocipede : there is gyra- 
tion, if there is not absolute revolution, all the 
time. To the all-wise Greeks the quadrature of 
the circle is a trifle ; they see through govern- 
mental and administrative perplexities, and could 
point you out a thousand modes of settling them. 
But they never do. They see through the mill- 
stone ; but it grinds them no corn. Hence their 
politics without a party, coalitions without a pol- 
icy, dissolutions and recombinations in dizzying 
succession. The people gaze and whip on the 



234 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

top : all which comes from six hundred and twen- 
ty-two out of the twelve hundred university stu- 
dents being lawyers. 

The singular and spontaneous outburst of gam- 
bling throughout Greece on New Year's Eve and 
New Year's Day is a phenomenon. Though 
strictly forbidden by law throughout Europe, with 
the exception of Monaco, there is an annual re- 
bellion in Greece which rages for several days 
and involves all classes of the population. Banks 
are improvised in the cafes, and groups of im- 
passioned players and passionate pilgrims sur- 
round the tables, dumbly staring or desperately 
playing. Processions of boys move through the 
streets at night, and press into all the coffee- 
houses and wine-shops, with drummer and flute- 
blower leading ; they drag around a great picture 
of a vessel or steamship, or a dunce-cap of colored 
paper on a frame, illuminated inside. The boys 
crowd around the transparency and accompany 
its progress through the town with a peculiar 
Turkish-sounding chant. As soon as they enter 
a cafe they hand round a plate and gather in 
coppers. On New Year's Day itself the object of 
these collections comes out : tables are set up in all 
the streets, whereon roulette-dishes stand, a raga- 
muffin plays croupier, and other ragamuffins 
stand round gloating on the game. Sometimes 
playthings and confectionery, provided with nura- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 235 

bers, are placed upon the table, and lottery num- 
bers are drawn out of a bag. This gives a 
glimpse of Young Greece. And they will ask 
Your Brilliancy (eras Aa/xTrporaTTys) for money with 
all imaginable grace and glibness, and in times 
of mourning will even crape their chimneys to 
show their deep and indescribable grief. 

American legislators night contemplate with 
edification the salaries of three hundred and fifty 
dollars apiece,, which the parliamentary deputies 
get, and the two thousand given to the king's 
ministers. These pittances, one is told, are en- 
riched and increased by bribery, peculation, sales, 
threats, and manoeuvring. Though the deputies 
are allowed seats in the Boule, one is not allowed 
or expected to sit down in the house of God, for 
there are no seats. One's head swims before a 
sort of mirage of antiquity on seeing Sophokles, 
Socrates, Phil-Hellene, Stadion, and Euripides 
Street, neatly painted in black and white, and 
affixed to the house-corners. And if one hails 
one of the Maltese commissionaires standing in 
these streets, the incongruity may be increased 
by an answer in Arabic. And further, " Arabic 
corn " will rouse the indignation of all true Amer- 
icans as a name given to our maize. What with 
saints' days, names, mendicancy, and pride ; what 
with love of decorations and uniforms, quietness 
in crowds, family affection, honesty of servants, 



236 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

and laxity in official life, one's view of these 
strange people becomes touched with a thousand 
tints, and ends, like Wagner's operas, in a grand 
discord. Who was it who said that Athens be- 
came the Byzantine Siberia ? Those gloomy 
days are past, and we have a beautiful city, full 
of the intensest modern life, the liveliest colors, 
the newest modes and measures, gas, theatres, 
newspapers, and a king. The Greeks must try 
to be like everybody else, or perish in the effort. 
They approach it as nearly as a people in petti- 
coats can. True, their bookshops are unspeak- 
ably dismal, and contain nothing ; Pindar's fiaQv- 
£<m/oi women still trip about the thoroughfares; 
they greet one with the antique x a " L P e (hail !) ; the 
men kiss each other on parting, and the priests 
name the children ; but these little Hellenisms 
will probably soon wear away, and we shall have 
the Greeks as they desire to be — fourth-rate im- 
itations of the French. Lutetia Parisiorum, the 
favorite of Julian the Apostate, is the fit Mecca of 
these would-be apostate people. It is a French 
novel or a ribald play that one picks up in an 
Athenian bookstall, not often the erudite commen- 
tary of some German scholar who has spent a life- 
time on the Greek prepositions. And of the two 
one prefers the novel. That is at least light and 
handy, while the other is an interminable thicket 
of references in crabbed type. The books that fa- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 237 

vor Greece are sometimes found there, and those 
that do not, being on the index expurgatorius, are 
seldom to be found. Thus they live in a delightful 
atmosphere of perfumed self-complacency, and 
think all the world is agape with admiration. Ad- 
verse criticism is intolerable ; hence the odium of 
About, Fallmerayer, and others. If you fall on 
your knees and worship, then Greece may save 
you ; but the least sparkle of a critical eye will 
condemn to eternal banishment. The Greeks are 
now somewhat in the attitude of the Americans 
fifty years ago, — new, self-conscious, arrogant, 
and ignorant, fit subjects for the Halls and Trol- 
lopes that excoriated them. Like all near-sighted 
and slightly cleaf people, they are suspicious, and 
in inverse proportion to their having any reason 
to be. Natural laughter and smiles they con- 
strue into disapprobation ; a twitch of the mouth 
is a taunt thrown at some institution ; tourists 
are sbirros come to spy out the nakedness of 
the land and immortalize it in some . defamatory 
book. Tuckerman tells us that they have a 
rather unpleasant habit of writing letters to 
strangers whom they imagine wealthy, and, if 
they get anything, are occasionally seen enter- 
taining themselves and their friends with it at 
cafes. This I cannot vouch for, but it is cer- 
tainly not peculiar to this folk. There are 
kindly traits and good traits in them as in all ; 



238 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

only, pretense is a little more ebullient in Greece 
than elsewhere, and a habit of exaggeration is 
strong in the nation. A nation without conceit 
- — the illusion of (non-existent) greatness — would 
perhaps be little worth, for there is a grain of 
gold in the vice, which sometimes helps people 
into being eventually what they think they al- 
ready are. There are no ghosts to those who do 
not fear them, said Voltaire. The spectacle of 
regenerated, purified, and law-abiding Hellas 
would be a noble one for the world. Brigand- 
age extinguished, roads built, the country de- 
veloped, and foreign capital attracted, we should 
see the youngest of nationalities entering on a 
long and prosperous career, perhaps her ancient 
glory revived, and an ingenuous and ingenious 
population plucked from the grasp of scheming 
politicians. This is too much to hope for, until 
Greece has passed through the green and yeasty 
stage in which she now finds herself, — a stage 
which our gardens exhibit every spring, and 
which is not to be got through with till the long 
autumn and afternoon ripen with their beneficent 
heat. 

What a curious aspect foreign proper names 
have acquired in Greek ! Names familiar to us 
are often unintelligible at the first glance. Gen- 
eral Church, the former commander-in-chief of 
the Greek army, has become T^ovprt, ; Blooms- 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 239 

bury Museum, in London, BXovp.crjji7rovpe Mover eiov ; 
Washington and Webster, BdaiyKTwv and Tove/3- 
<TT€p; Manchester and Mahomet, Mdyyto-rpia and 
MwdfjLtO ; Connecticut and Wellington, Kovv€ktlk(xt 
and YoveXiyKrojv ; Clay, Monroe, and California, 
KXalv, Movpoe, and KaXXtcj^povta ; Liverpool, Pic- 
cadilly, Stanfield, and Finlay (the historian of 
Greece), At/SeprrovX, UtKaStXXo, ^rdv<ptr]X8, and 
^>LVAai3 ; Birmingham and Victoria, BtpfiLyyapL and 
BtKTopta 1 all ingenious and happy, but fantastic- 
looking reproductions. 

A similar transformation has taken place in the 
folk-lore of ancient Greece. A delightful chapter 
might be written by some competent person on 
modern Greek folk-lore. It is full of the per- 
fume of antiquity, strikingly original and poetic, 
and abounds in archaeological interest. Bernhard 
Schmidt * has made a most interesting collection 
of contemporary Hellenic usage and tradition in 
this respect ; but it is not accessible to the non- 
German-reading investigator. " As a rule, good 
books are in German," says Seeley, " and it may 
happen that the student does not know German." 

The nereid-legend is the loveliest of all, and 
winds through popular life in Hellas like a 
golden thread. "Beautiful as anereid," "nereid- 
eyed," are common expressions even among the 

1 Volksleben der Neugriechen und das Hellenische Alter - 
thum. Leipzig, 1871. 



24O GREEK VIGNETTES. 

lower classes. The nereids are no longer water- 
nymphs exclusively, but run through every phase 
of human and landscape life, embracing the 
naiads, oreads, and dryads. They visit as The 
Friendly Ones, the seas, rivers, springs, and fount- 
ains, the forests, gorges, and caves, the high 
mountains, valleys, and plains ; they nest in the 
huge niched olive-trees and stone oaks ; they 
give names to many localities ; they dance by 
moonlight on the ancient spots consecrated to 
them, like the Karykian cave of Parnassus, in 
antiquity; they are slender-figured, brilliant- 
faced ; beautiful girls are said to be nereid-born ■ 
their favorite colors are white and red ; here and 
there the splendid beauty attributed to them is 
disfigured by goat-like feet ; they are astonish- 
ingly light and agile, swing themselves in the air, 
and traverse incredible distances ; they live more 
than a thousand years, spin and weave for the 
slumbering house-wife ; a filmy-tendriled, airy 
climbing plant that twines about the peasants' 
homes is called nereid-thread ; to dance like a 
nereid is a proverb, and their song is enchanting; 
their gladness and gayety, their intermarriage 
with mortals, their dancing on the^ mountains to 
the shepherd's flutes ; the multitude of beautiful 
legends of young men of extraordinary comeli- 
ness who became their lovers, and to whom they 
delivered themselves up; the legendary descent 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 24 1 

of many families from them ; the disastrous in- 
fluence they exercise at noon, as The Hostile 
Ones, especially in summer, near a stream, or in 
the shadow of a plane, poplar, fig, or chestnut 
tree, at cross-roads and beside mills ; the irre- 
sistible power they exert over young people in 
luring them to wander in the woods by themselves 
until death overtakes them • their dwelling in the 
whirlwinds which visit Greece in summer, and the 
deprecatory prayer the old women mutter at that 

time — MeAt koX yaAa orrov Spo/Jio eras (milk and 
honey on your path !) ; the curious and confused 
medley of pagan and Christian myth blending in 
the infinite legends about them : all this conspires 
to cast a glamour over the rude rustic life, which 
is close to the freshest morning imagination. It 
shows extraordinary facility and vivacity of fancy, 
and a strange persistence of legends current in 
ancient and mediaeval times. 

Then the drymia that live in the water, the cu- 
rious race of demons, called exotic, that haunt 
graveyards and reeds and lonesome places by 
night and at noon, the holy hour of the gods, 
when it was dangerous to play on the flute, for 
while the sun is glowing and glistening in the mid- 
heavens men feel the need of rest and the gods 
may walk forth undisturbed : these are the coun- 
ter-balance on the dark side to the bright-haired, 
beautiful-footed nereids. Demonic might, in the 
16 



242 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

popular superstition, is attributed to the lamia, 
another series of sea-spirits, to whom has passed 
much of the fantastical power over men and 
music belonging to the sirens. They are the 
bugaboo of children, and figure largely in the di- 
lating twilight and magnifying dusk. Sea-demons, 
the horrible striglce that fly by night to the cra- 
dles of young children and suck their blood ; the 
child-killing Gello, that transforms itself into a 
fish, a swallow, and a strand of goat's hair ; the 
monno, with which nurses frighten children ; the 
Gorgona, descendant of the classic Gorgo ; the 
kalikantsari, the werewolves of Greece, who get 
possession of the babes born between Christmas 
and New Year, since it is sinful for mortal women 
to bear children within the period consecrated to 
the pangs and purification of the Holy Mother ; 
who come down the chimney and make ugly work 
with the pots and kettles, but stand in mortal 
dread of a black cock : all these furnish food to 
the lively, illiterate peasantry in the long winter 
nights, and interweave their singular influences 
with the doings and sayings of the people. Neo- 
Hellenic demonology has more than one rem- 
iniscence of the ancient Pan and Hephaestus in 
the lame demon and the demons of the flocks 
and herds. The vampyre, which is the soul of a 
dead man expiating some great crime, is another 
thrilling creation of popular fancy. Then come 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 243 

the telonia, or spirits of the air, that sparkle 
electrically along the cordage of ships by night 
in storms ; the guardian angels, that accompany 
men through life; the house-snakes, that are local 
spirits ; the treasure-guarding dragons, that re- 
call the Hesperides-myth, to conciliate whom a 
little blood must be spilt under the treasure ; the 
giants' graves, shown in many places ; the three 
Fates, who are still so busy with the Greek im- 
agination, and who are spinning, reeling off, and 
clipping the thread of life as diligently as ever, 
even their names (/xoipcu) being unchanged : a 
cluster of myths beautifully interwoven with all 
manner of graceful custom, reminding one of 
May-day superstitions and All Hallow E'en. Cha- 
ron and the under-world open the earth and let 
out a flight of strange, lovely, and poetic beliefs, 
which mix in with the speech and habitudes of the 
day, and give rise to phrases, songs, and sayings 
innumerable. Charon is not only boatman of 
the under-world, he is the mighty ©draros, Death 
himself, with his shadowy realm. He is even 
taken into the service of the Christian Church 
and made to minister in certain things ; now mild, 
tender, and sympathetic, then menacing and re- 
lentless. The joyless Homeric view of death as 
the supreme evil is still rife. All, good and bad 
alike, descend to Hades, and life only is the high- 
est blessing. Countless lights burn in the king- 



244 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

dom of Charon, each one of which represents a 
human life one by one extinguished. Paradise 
and Hades change places in this odd semi-pagan- 
ized condition of mind so common in less visited 
Greece, while the reeds that kiss each other in 
the bending wind are the souls of lovers giving 
the last caress. 

All this is inextricably entangled with a mass 
of Christian superstitions, legends of saints, mar- 
tyrs, and devils, religious festivals and commem- 
orations, mythological ideas of God, pictures, rel- 
ics, vows, and consecrations. Here the Madonna- 
legend has taken strongest and strangest hold, 
and is now a tender, now a pathetic, and now a 
sublime creation of loving and worshiping fancy. 



VI. 

We left Athens by the Lucifer — and a Lucifer 
of a time we had ! It blew something of a gale 
all day, and nearly everybody was laid out. I 
was called at five in the morning, made my toilet, 
drank a dish of tea, and then went down to my 
good Sat/xoH', Miltiades Vidis. We found nearly 
all the servants of the establishment waiting, 
hands out, including the dark-eyed, handsome 
proprietor, and I gave fees to five of the attaches 
(attaches indeed, for they stick to you like wax !), 
and left as many open-mouthed, empty-handed, 
and chagrined. Athens was very beautiful in 
the early morning — in the gray, dewy, sunlight- 
flushed Attic morning. I had never felt the won- 
derful beauty of its situation so fully before. The 
deserted streets and closed houses ; the occa- 
sional cry of an itinerant wood-vender, driving 
his asses on the sunny side of the street ; a car- 
riage or two loitering in the square below ; the 
bright, mysterious, fresco-like fringe of mountains 
just beginning to live and lighten on the borders 
of the Attic plain ; the cool distances of tender 
blue sea singularly calm in this silent hour, — 



246 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

what pangs of poetic reminiscence such a scene 
awakens ! Then think how delightful it was to 
drive in one of those comfortable Athenian a/xa- 
£ai, with a quick pair of horses, the top thrown 
back, and the delicious sting of the fresh morning 
air in one's face ! To see the Orient one must 
see it in the early morning. The twin dusks of 
morning and evening soften its ardent lights and 
shadows, throw a veil over its intolerable suns, 
and fill one's memory with enjoyable recollec- 
tions. 

We whirled on down the fine road to the Pi- 
raeus (four miles distant), and I turned back 
many times to take parting glances at the great 
theatre of ancient history. The roads were just 
being watered, and we were saved the annoyance 
(which is perennial at Athens) of the subtile, wind- 
blown lime dust. For a long distance the road is 
a splendid avenue of silver-poplars, locusts, and 
plane trees, with brown, sunburnt fields or vine- 
yards loaded with grapes on each side. The 
long stretch of noble olive-trees lay nestled in 
silver uncertainty at this early hour. Far away 
we could see the white walls of the Monastery of 
St. Elias, at the entrance of the Pass of Daphne, 
receiving an acute accent from the advancing 
sun. Groups of market-people and donkeys, 
wagons and peasants, passed us on their way to 
Athens. In an hour we had reached the noisy 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 247 

harbor of Piraeus, catching glimpses of the Long 
Wall of Themistocles here and there. We paid 
our five drachmae, got into the boat (two drach- 
mae), and were rowed out to the Lucifer, which I 
was nearly the first to reach. Other passengers 
soon came, and by eight o'clock a crowd had 
gathered, several handsome Italian men and 
women among them. Before we left the wind 
had increased to violence, and filled the air far 
out to sea with a cloud of dust. There was, how- 
ever, an inconceivable refreshment in the wind 
after the protracted heat and languor of Athens. 
The Acropolis hung in the distance for a long 
time after our departure, and did not finally dis- 
appear till we were in the neighborhood of Su- 
nium. Mournful and majestic it looked in this 
silver silence, as we sped past the island of 
Salamis, the shores of ^Egina, the peak of Mount 
Gerania, and the long and lofty range of Isth- 
mian and Peloponnesian mountains, all pure and 
perfect in outline as a Chinese carving. Who in 
this singularly magnificent scene of the Saronic 
Gulf could help remembering that grand passage 
in the " Agamemnon " of JEschylus where he 
celebrates the beacon-lights shot into sudden 
bloom on the mountain-tops by the fall of Troy ? 
Just so these fairy heights shot into ethereal 
bloom under the golden touch of the morn, the 
" Torch of Conquest " and " Traveling Fire " 
that lighted even to Agamemnon's battlements. 



248 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

There was the usual amount of distrait con- 
versation at breakfast, carried on in voluble Ital- 
ian or spasmodic Greek, copiously bedewed with 
Szexard wine. And then the chicken buried in 
rancid rice, the filet de boenf pointed with tomato 
sauce, the greasy potatoes and aromatic, oily 
salad, followed, not by Gruyere or frontage de Brie, 
but by the usual melancholy mockery of with- 
ered fruit and coffee. Then the gale came with 
vehemence, followed by a scene of piteous and 
indescribable woe : grewsome men and women 
stretched out ; horrid children laid low ; puling 
babies a-squeak ; handing about of hideous blue- 
porcelain pots ; impossibility of reading or keep- 
ing still. Although we were passing down a neck- 
lace of bright isles — never out of sight of their 
blueness and beauty and fantastical grace — it 
all seemed a mockery to the dismayed passen- 
gers ; and those who had taken breakfast, and 
those who had not, were equally loathly. The 
fine ruined temple on Cape Sunium fortunately 
passed before us ere this crisis of disenchant- 
ing weather befell. And all this gale and tumult 
of wind while the loveliest blue sky was beaming 
above, the wildest and winsomest sunlight was 
beating about us. 

At 5 or 6 we steamed into Syra — the island- 
port of the Levant — and anchored before the 
charming little oriental city, being immediately 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 249 

boarded and captured by a throng of rogues, 
who would take us ashore in spite of ourselves. 
I never saw such a set of wild monkeys as these 
Greek islanders — knowing just enough of sev- 
eral languages to inspire you with faint hope, 
and then allure you into inextricable difficulties, 
insolent, rapacious, and sharp. We were to wait 
till midnight for the great mail-steamer from 
Constantinople to Corfu. The night, of course, 
passed either sleeplessly or with troubled snatches 
of ill-sufficing slumber, for at half-past one we 
had to bargain with a boatman to carry us over 
this Styx and put us on the mail-steamer. Rough 
water, dim light, a throng of clamorous wretches 
surrounding the Ettore, through whom, with Odys- 
sean cunning, we vainly strove to make our way ; 
a steep ladder on the side of the ship to climb, 
while the boat bounded wildly; an evident de- 
sire on the part of the batteliere to make off 
into the midnight with my baggage while I was 
climbing ; a multitude of barges and passenger 
larche, whose owners were all shouting and quar- 
reling in chorus. What a night ! I felt several 
years older when I finally got safe and sound 
to the deck of -the Ettore, and groped my way 
in the darkness down into the cabin. A long 
ship full of many-colored oriental life — Ger- 
mans, Austrians, Americans, English, Dalmatians, 
Turks, Greeks, Italians, French, Moslems, and 



250 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

missionaries, soldiers and civilians, men in fezes, 
pugguries, turbans, a band of wandering musi- 
cians fleeing from Aclrianople, groups of Turks 
lying about on rugs and bright-colored mattresses, 
in the midst of melons, playing-cards, snoring, 
eating, praying, prostrating themselves toward 
Mecca ; Eastern women sprawling and squatting 
here and there on the second-class deck ; fierce- 
looking fellows with pistols sticking out of their 
belts or swathed about the loins with gay-hued 
sashes ; everywhere the flashing eyes, thick 
brows, and pale skins of the Levant. 

The deck looked like the ward of an Eastern 
hospital : it was covered over with thick awnings 
to keep out the sun ; pallets were spread every- 
where j a huge, green, rollicking parrot peeped 
out of one side of the gangway pavilion, and 
the Dalmatian captain, smoking an enormous 
hookah, sat in the other. The Germans chat- 
tered ; the French shrugged and gesticulated ; the 
English sang hymns over the wheel-house ; the 
Turks played cards, munched melons, smoked 
interminable cigarettes, and squatted on their 
heels ; and the wandering musicians, recovering 
from their seasickness, forgot their exile, and 
gave us the liveliest waltzes and polkas for our 
Sunday afternoon ! What a crowded, colored, 
feverish three days it was ! My state-room com- 
panions were Germans, - — a young clerk from 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 2^\ 

Smyrna; a florid-faced, gold-spectacled Frank- 
forter from Athens, always talking about work- 
ing for the Greeks, Lumpenpack, etc., etc. ; and 
a pot-bellied Viennese, full of fun, ribaldry, and 
beer, all the time. The cuisine was like a French 
menu gone mad — a mixture of all nationalities, 
substances, and sauces, good enough in its way, 
too, but for the infinite piquancy of its unknown 
ingredients. The Austrian Lloyd's steamers fur- 
nish an abundance of food, which is eatable 
enough, but rather promiscuous. The attendance 
is good. Mixed as the food was, I could not 
help thinking how superior it appeared to the 
brutal coarseness of an Atlantic steamer's fare, 
where you have mountains of meat and not a 
savory morsel, " thirty- two religions and but one 
sauce ! " How gladly would one throw away the 
long phalanx of abominable pastry for a single 
dainty Italian or French dessert ! But the loaded 
stomach must be sickened with fifty custards, 
pies, and puddings, or J. Bull will grumble. An 
ocean steamer is indeed (and alas ! ) but the ves- 
tibule of our polyglot and polygluttonous Ameri- 
can cookery. 

The Ettore was what they call in Levant slang 
a celere, or fast steamer, and made good time. 
At 7 in the morning — Sunday morning — we 
left Syra, and in the evening we were round- 
ing Cape Malea and steaming in and around the 



252 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

beautiful peaked and pointed land of the Pelo- 
ponnese. A hermit dwells on this desolate but 
brilliant Naze. The Etiore fired a gun as we 
passed, but failed to draw him from his little hut, 
which crowned a picturesque rock and was sur- 
rounded by some evidences of a meagre garden. 
There was a tiny chapel at a short distance, and 
out in front the cincturing and opal-toned Med- 
iterranean. 

An infinite grotesguerie is this Peloponnesian 
coast — a piece of goblin (not Gobelins) tapestry, 
for it shoots out and then in, with long inland- 
stretching lapses of sunlit coast-line ; bold out- 
tossings and upturnings of cragged and castled 
promontory; distances hung thick with historic 
mountains, curves, and crescent-like gulfs, — in 
short, a grand, gnarled Gothic coast, most brill- 
iantly bare and pictorial. It is like a piece of 
music by Liszt. Sailing in and out, up and 
down it, is like following the lines of an old 
Venetian globe ; now you are in the stars and 
now in terra incog7iita ; now among constellated 
dragons, now meandering along the twisted 
Indies. Half the day and night we seemed to 
be pursuing this will-o'-the-wisp voyage — round- 
ing Cape Matapan, slipping by one lovely bit 
of sea-surrounded rock after another, catching 
up with other vessels and then leaving them 
far behind, prolonging our walks and talks and 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 2$$ 

music far into the moonlit night, for the silver 
spectre of the half-moon hung over the Pelopon- 
nesus and dogged us as it did the Ancient Mari- 
ner. All day Monday we passed over familiar 
ground — or, rather, water : Zante, Paxo, Cepha- 
lonia, Ithaca, Santa Maura ; and lastly, late in 
the night, reached Corfu, under the same serene, 
sterile moonlight. The indescribable beauty of 
the Ionian Islands need not be dwelt on again. 

I took a boat and landed, and am now 
" inned " (as Chaucer says) in the gray old Ho- 
tel St. Georges, waiting for the Brindisi steamer. 
This steamer sails to-morrow afternoon. I am 
glad we stopped at Corfu. Those who do not 
land here have little idea of its beauty, unrivaled 
as the sea-glimpse of it is. The gray rocks, the 
tropical vegetation, the tangled and tumultuous 
line of mountain that so delightfully bewilders 
the eye as it vainly attempts to follow its sinu- 
osities ; the picturesque Albanian crags opposite, 
some with villages grove-embowered and gleam- 
ing ; the long curves and expanses of lovely blue 
water ; the drives, the walks, the soft and saintly 
purples of the mountains, bright with an infinite 
poesy, the world of graceful water and fertile 
land, — make up one of the richest pictures of 
insular and oriental life. The coloring of the 
houses is so mellow, and such a relief after the 
painful whiteness of new Athens ! There are, 



254 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

too, numerous traces of the four hundred years' 
Venetian occupation, in the quaint Venetianized 
architecture ; the narrow, winding streets spanned 
by arches ; the graceful bell-towers, with their 
time-worn clocks outside ; the embrasured win- 
dows, lofty houses, tiny gardens of orange and 
ilex, and traces of sculptured portals. The town 
is all huddled together in a sort of valley between 
the Fortrezza Nuova and the ancient, double- 
peaked citadel. These double peaks gave the 
ancient name (Corcyra) to the place. I have 
not noticed even one respectable-looking shop, 
but all is delightfully cramped, huddled, and old- 
fashioned. About one half the buying and sell- 
ing seems to be done in the streets. One comes 
on a perfect nest of cobblers working in these 
streets, gossiping, mending, working, laughing, 
eating. Then a den of a cafe (/ca^cmov) hangs 
out its sign in Greek and Italian, and bids you 
come in and enjoy its delights. The whole town 
seems given up to the sale of fruits — glorious 
oranges with pieces of the green limb still cling- 
ing to them, pine-apples, pears, peaches, melons. 
Then one comes on cheese-shops full of white 
zimoto cream-cheeses — cheeses yellow, green, 
fresh, and fragrant. There is the usual quantum 
of Romaic 7rai/T07raA€ta, or groceries filled with 
gastronomic curiosities. Then succeed long Bo- 
lognese arcades, labyrinthine 6$ol, or alleys, 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 255 

with lines stretched across, full of newly-laun- 
dried clothes, the painted blue-and-white arch of 
a Byzantine chapel, a slender silhouette- like Ital- 
ian campanile, all mellowness and mossy beauty, 
a pile of steep-gabled cinque-cento houses, a 
cluster of twisted, convoluted chimneys, a bit 
of ruined, lichen-covered wall, a palace with a 
statue in front, a gate whose arch and classic 
balustrade frame exquisite pictures of sea and 
mountains, an ancient inn with a belfry and win- 
dow-embrasures green and gay with geraniums, 
a turreted parapet looking down on the bright- 
est wine-like water, a group of cypresses, a moat, 
and a grand crag full of dismantled fortifications. 
Such is an epitome of this town of twenty-five 
thousand inhabitants. Unrivaled drives lead out 
from it into the country on various sides, — the 
One-Gun Battery, Benizze, Coruna, the Oak, San 
Pantaleone, — not to speak of the countless in- 
teresting bridle-paths that scatter and scamper 
over the fields and hills in all directions. Then 
there is life here. All the steamers east and 
west make this their calling-place. The English 
have civilized the country in point of roads, 
though not of currencies. It is but twelve hours 
across to Brindisi, and one is thus freed from the 
sad isolation of continental Greece. The coun- 
try is kept green by rain. The perpetual neu- 
trality of Corfu, established when the English 



256 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

gave up their protectorate of the Ionian Islands, 
conduces to a feeling of prosperous tranquillity. 
Intensely Greek as are the Corfiotes, they are 
too wise not to take advantage of this admirable 
state of things, and get rich and independent as 
soon as possible. After their singularly varied 
and stormy history, beginning with the revolt 
mentioned by Thucydides, this lull is just what 
they wanted. One sees beggars, but perhaps 
they are constitutionally such, for the island is 
still what Xenophon, three hundred and fifty 
years before Christ, described it, a paradise of 
fertility. Perhaps, therefore, the beggars are the 
conscientious or the constitutional ones. The 
money one gives them clinks in their pockets 
with other moneys they have harvested in other 
rounds — is, perhaps, even kept to give you 
change. 

The Hotel St. Georges, where I am staying 
(the grand Hotel St. Georges, no matter how 
small !), is a very funny old affair, full of cuddies 
and corners, canary-birds in cages, innumerable 
pots of blooming flowers lining the staircases and 
entries, mirrors and slices of mirrors throwing 
your silvered elongation into half-mystified dis- 
tances ; with, too (positively), a mosquito-net on 
the little brass bedstead in my room. It fronts 
the esplanade and its rich shade trees, where I 
hear the cicadae singing as they do in our dear 



GREEK VIGNETTES. 257 

land, and where the nurses and babies play all 
day long in the heavy-lidded sunlight. This es- 
planade is just the spot for that " beautiful but 
baneful influence of classic reverie " of which Dis- 
raeli speaks ; that sweet meditation which takes 
us back to Homer, Thucydides, Xenophon, Ac- 
tium, and Lepanto. One can sit on the benches 
under the elms and plane-trees and dream delight- 
ful dreams of ancient poets and philosophers, re- 
construct Plato's Republic, listen to the eloquent 
talk of Socrates, glance down the coast of Elis, 
and repeople it with the mighty song of Pindar. 
The tzitzirbos sing so lazily in the sunny air ; a 
far steamer, faint in the sea and morning light 
of the horizon, creeps stealthily into greater and 
greater clearness as you gaze over to the grand 
Acroceraunian crags ; the gray citadel, rising as 
it does from clustering churches, looks lumi- 
nously dim in this azure incandescent air, and 
might tell you delightful co7ttes of the doges and 
the pashas ; cooling winds blow in from the 
plate-glass sea and stir mellifluously among the 
thicket of scarlet geraniums that faces the antique 
lion of St. Mark's, carved in the wall of the castle- 
moat. Looking on this eloquence of sunlight 
and perfume and perfect sea and air, one is be- 
witched as with the Lamia-gaze of some dazzling 
serpent. I cannot think of a more charming 
place than Corfu in the summer — full of game, 
17 



258 GREEK VIGNETTES. 

fish, and fruit ; full of the gentle murmurs of 
poetic antiquity ; full of grace, scenery, and 
quaintness. Yesterday evening the full moon 
burst from behind the Epirote mountains, at first 
like the brilliant glistening crimson of a huge 
pomegranate that has burst its bell and revealed 
the scarlet beauty of its seed ; then more and 
more like some wonderful flower, as it rose and 
rose until it hung on tiptoe on the sharp mount- 
ain-edge, then slipped into the starry ether in 
luminous serenity. How weird Castrades, and 
the pallid sun-shotten water, and the looming 
castle looked, under the amber symphonies of 
this fairy light ! In the evening, at six, I leave 
by the Sultan from Smyrna for Brindisi. We 
have had a slight shower, which has suffused the 
arid silvery air with moisture, and left behind 
the " Midsummer-Night's Dream " in clouds. 




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